Flight control system design for a small unmanned aircraft

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has designed, fabricated and successfully tested a small electrically-powered autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV, which is intended to be a missile decoy, is designed to be deployed with wings and tail surfaces folded from a standard shipboard chaff round launcher. This paper describes the design and development of a microcontroller based automatic flight control system for the UAV. The flight control system hardware, software, control laws, and the methods used to synthesize the control laws are described. Flight test results are discussed.