ASSESSMENT OF PID-BASED CONTROL OF SERVOACTUATORS FOR FLIGHT REGULATION OF SMALL UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES

Flight control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are responsible for maintaining safe flight – they are required to be reliable and robust. Flight regulation is achieved by controlling servomotors linked to flight control surfaces – ailerons, rudder, elevators and flaps. The most important parameters in servomotor control are position and speed. Hence, this work performed an assessment of proportional integral and derivative based controllers for servo motors used in attitude control of UAVs. In the experiment, the performance of proportional-velocity (PV) position and proportional-integral (PI) speed controllers were investigated by studying the impact of the individual gains on the dynamics of the systems. Both PV position and PI speed controllers demonstrated satisfactory performance with few challenges including presence of measurement noise and steady state error. The PV position controller addressed these challenges with its superior noise suppression ability. This makes it more ideal for controlling servo actuators of flight control surfaces.