RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF UAV AUTOPILOT USING MATLAB/SIMULINK

BAE SYSTEMS Controls is a leading supplier of flight-critical systems and their electronics. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) are examples of our strategic applications. This paper presents a summary of our recent efforts in developing an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Through cross- division reuse of Simulink models, navigation solutions, off-of-the-shelf electronic controllers, RF data links and ground control stations, we were able to develop and flight-test the UAV flight avionics systems and ground control stations (including air-ground data links) from scratch in eight months. The control analysis, code generation, modeling and simulation capabilities of MATLAB/Simulink played a key role in the success of this product development. The paper gives an overview of the UAV system architecture first. Then the modeling, design, analysis, code generation and testing of the autopilot and engine monitoring algorithms using MATLAB/Simulink are summarized. The paper concludes that design cost and design cycle time can be greatly reduced using new and reliable tools and better engineering processes.