A study on Artificial Horizon for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems

초록

Recently many researches are focused on the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A small and light weight and cheap artificial horizon may be the most important sensor for attitude control of UAV. Very small size accelerometers are possible by the mechanical-electrical machine system (MEMS) technology. Also the low cost rate gyros are introduced by MEMS technology or conventional beam vibrating structure in the size of only one or two centimeters long. In this study, the basic configuration which is an artificial horizon is proposed. Because the rate gyro has no gimbals, the artificial horizon must be the strapdown type. Mutually orthogonal three accelerometers and three rate gyros are used for elementary sensors. A simple strapdown artificial horizon algorithm is driven and analyzed for the steady stat errors in the case of small angle deviation. The simulation study shows that error propagations were bounded in spite of the existence of random error and continuous bias error. By this study the promising results are obtained for the purpose of airborne attitude sensor of an UAV.