Guidance, Navigation and Control of a Powered Parafoil Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

One of the most important issues currently facing the oil and gas industries is the safety and security of pipelines which deliver crude oil from the reservoir to the refineries. Many complications such as waxing, slugging, rusting, theft, etc. obstruct the regular supply of fuel to the refineries. Continuous monitoring of pipelines is a major hurdle because of climatic conditions, length of the pipelines, identification of leakage, etc. Here we showcase an unmanned autonomous powered parachute aerial vehicle designed for monitoring such pipelines, thereby paving a way to solve this problem. The vehicle would follow a planned trajectory for following the pipeline effectively. We present here guidance, navigation and control of a powered parachute aerial vehicle. A nine degree of freedom mathematical model has been presented in detail. Lateral heading and longitudinal altitude hold controller was designed for this purpose. A path planning algorithm verified by actual flight parameters has been designed for following a trajectory using way point navigation.

Altitude control for flexible wing unmanned aerial vehicle based on active disturbance rejection control and feedforward compensation

“…Hua et al 9 and Umenberger and Göktogan 19 explored the PID controller with a fast estimation and identified model. In another research of PID method from the work of Devalla et al, 20 without the horizontal control, it can be observed that the error between the reference altitude and actual value is 5 meters for a small system. Aoustin and Yuri 21 proposed a feedback linearization control method, the altitude error is nearly 8 meters in the simulation.…”

Dynamic Modeling and Experimental Verification of Powered Parafoil With Two Suspending Points

“…The concerned powered parafoil (PPF) is composed of parafoil and payload with a propeller equipped on the back of it [8]. The payload is connected to the parafoil via two suspending points to reduce the relative yaw angle.…”

“…Therefore, a more accurate model should be introduced in the study. A complicated model with nine DOF is proposed by adding three rotational DOF of the payload to the six DOF model of the parafoil [8], [19]- [21]. However, this model is only applicable to parafoil vehicles with only one suspending point between the paraloil and the payload.…”