Guidance, Navigation and Control of a Small-Scale Paramotor

This paper presents a guidance, navigation and control software architecture intended for a light weight, smallscale parafoil suspended motorised aircraft, known as a paramotor. The system is comprised of feedback compensated control laws for both heading and altitude tracking, and an elementary path planning logic that allows for waypoint navigation. A six degree-of-freedom mathematical model describing the aircraft dynamics is first presented, followed by the derivation and system identification of simplified, linear lateral and longitudinal models that are then verified by comparison with real flight data. The de-coupled linear models are used for controller design by classical frequency domain techniques, and simulations demonstrating the performance of the proposed controller architecture are conducted in MATLAB Simulink.