Development of Experimental Platform for Control System of a Planar Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The main contribution of this paper is to present the design and construction of an experimental platform applied to a Planar Vertical Take-off and Landing (PVTOL) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) prototype by considering the rotational and translational motion of the vehicle. The instrumentation of the experimental platform and their parts are presented in order to explain how the system measures the position and the rotational displacement of the vehicle. Finally, experimental results are presented using a hierarchical scheme considering the well-known time-scale separation between the rotational and the translational motion of the PVTOL employing the experimental platform. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed experimental platform show that the platform can be used to apply different control strategies.