Designing low-cost autopilot system for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle

Aerospace industry is one of the fastest growing industries by the developing technology. Unmanned aerial vehicles are products of this technology. These vehicles which can be controlled over a station somewhere in the world, has an important role especially for the armed forces of the nations. They can be used for civilian purposes such as agricultural activities, early detection of the forest fires, watching the oil pipelines etc. But they are still very expensive vehicles for personal use because of the hardware they have. In this study, it has been aimed to develop an autopilot system for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle by using low-cost sensors and microcontrollers. PID control method was used to make the vehicle navigate between the given waypoints and control the attitude of the vehicle. Noise problem which occurs while measuring the system outputs has been tried to overcome by using Kalman Filter, and states of the system that can not be measured directly were observed and used in the control loop.