Construction, Modeling and Control of an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Target Localization

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in intelligence gathering, psychological operations, laser designation, range-finding, and communication. In this paper, the design of a fixed-wing UAV is presented. A target detection and localization method is proposed for the developed UAV. The hardware construction, along with the selection of necessary components, is introduced. In order to facilitate modular code development and integration of control laws with simulation and hardware, a hardware-in-the-loop simulator is proposed. The flight control law is developed and tested using the hardware-in-the-loop simulator. Wifi is used for monitoring the state variables of the aircraft. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the performance of the developed system.