Design of autopilot platform using HILS approach

Each day comes, the sector of autopilot and Unmanned vehicles get bigger exponentially; the autopilot design process plays an essential role in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) development process. Autopilot can be designed and developed using different approaches depending on the control theory which is adopted in this paper Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) is adopted. Testing of autopilot system during design process can be done using different methods such as wind tunnel which is the most accurate but also the most expensive, real fly tests may be used in verification of the autopilot but it's too risky, the third approach which is used in this paper is the Hardware in the loop simulation (HILS). Matlab/Simulink in association with Aerosim blockset library were used to develop the HILS, Arduino mega board was used as the autopilot hardware due to its availability, simplicity, and cost efficient features. A PID-based autopilot was designed for UAV stability and automatic pre-defined route following, the system has been tested using HILS with acceptable performance and cost efficient approach.