Lateral and Longitudinal Controllers Design for a Fixed Wing UAV

Since the time when flying became a reality, there was a tendency to think about controlling airplanes autonomously. Autopilots design and implementation have gained a huge concentration from researchers all around the globe since the early beginnings of the past century. This is because of the major benefits that such systems provide which range from sparing humans' lives from hazardous situations, to having the ability to record experimental data. Although there are numerous kinds of autopilots, this paper comprises a successive loops methodology, which is used for designing PID controllers for both longitudinal and lateral behaviors of a six degrees of freedom, fixed wing Ultrastick25-e airplane. Then the proposed design approach is simulated and tested on MATLAB Simulink.