Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Pitch Optimization for Fast Response of Elevator Control System

The flight dynamics of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is the science of its orientation and control in three dimensions. The three primary orientations include: the Pitch, the Roll and the Yaw. The rear part of the tailplane is known as the elevator control of an UAV pitch (the rotating around the transversal axis). Flight route deviations and flight altitude variations due to hash weather conditions such as shock waves or thunder storm and the wind speed/direction during flight greatly affect the pitch of UAV. Consequently, series of UAV mishaps (air crash) caused by pitch control faults have been recorded in the aviation industry in recent times. Such pitch control faults are mostly caused by inadequate speed and accuracy in the automatic control of UAV pitch mechanism or the tail elevator. The main goal of this research is to design a classical controller that optimizes the pitch control response speed and accuracy of an UAV with built-in autopilot. A PID controller has been design and fine-tuned with MATLAB PID Tuner to obtain suitable gains for faster and accurate response of the UAV elevator. The improved control parameters achieved in verifying the model and design by simulation with MATLAB/Simulink are the settling time of 0.436 seconds, the rise time of 0.113 seconds, the percentage overshoot of 9.43% and a steady-state error less than 2%