Autonomous hovering control and test for micro air vehicle

This paper presents an investigation of autonomous hovering flight control of micro air vehicles (MAVs). The control system consists of an onboard section with a self-made micro azimuth gradienter sensor and a ground station. An open-loop control strategy named teaching-by showing based control is proposed by stimulating a skilled human operator's manipulation of the aircraft, with the objective of learning operator's manipulation and then generating a set of command data to control MAV's hovering. A feedforward plus a PD feedback control is further employed to control the aircraft using the command data generated in the open-loop control. The PD control gains are tuned automatically according to the attitude of the vehicle by fuzzy logic theory. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated in autonomous hovering flight experiments conducted on a one-meter sized aircraft.