Design of an aircraft pitch control experimental test bench

Aircraft pitch control is fundamental to improve the performance of unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper presents the instrumentation and modeling process of an experimental platform for aircraft pitch control. A complementary filter is designed to improve the angular position estimation based on inertial measurements. The platform was used for the implementation of different controllers in a wind tunnel facility: a Ziegler-Nichols PID and a loop shaping compensator. The test bench allows the implementation of typical continuous-time linear and non-linear controllers. The plant identification process is designed to compute the parameters that meet the open loop time domain characteristics and the closed loop frequency characteristics. The time delay in the control loop is computed through an experiment and used for the loop shaping design process. The controllers are implemented and compared according to its time domain performance. The best suited control is then analyzed in terms of perturbation rejection and more demanding tests. The article shows that the resulting test bench is suitable for the experimental evaluation of typical pitch angle control strategies. Due to the integration with a wind tunnel, the test bench is able to simulate a wide range of flight conditions. Including extreme conditions that would not be safe in real flight experiments.