Construction, modelling, and control of an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle for target localization

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely used in intelligence gathering, psychological operations, laser designation, range finding, and communication. In this paper, the design of a fixed-wing UAV is presented. A target detection and localization method was proposed for the developed UAV. The hardware construction, along with the selection of necessary components, is introduced here. To facilitate modular code development and integration of control laws with simulation and hardware, a hardware-in-the-loop simulator was proposed. The flight control law was developed and tested using the hardware-in-the-loop simulator. WiFi was used for monitoring the state variables of the aircraft. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the performance of the developed system.