Pitch Attitude Hold Autopilot for YTU EC-001 Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Small aircrafts, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are playing progressively important roles in military and civilian application around the world. This paper focus on pitch attitude hold autopilot design for YTU-EC 001 UAV. The YTU-EC-001 is Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in research of Yangon Technological University. In this paper, mathematical modeling, equation of motion on YTU-EC 001 Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and the pitch angle and pitch rate transfer functions are derived. These transfer functions showed that the system is stable by using MATLAB. Then controller for pitch altitude system is designed, based on the state space of linear model of the aircraft. A Proportional Integral-Derivative (PID) controller structure is chosen to achieve the system design requirements. The settling time is less than 2 seconds and overshoot should not exceed 3%.