Practice of Flight Control for Micro-Sized Fixed-Wing UAVs

Micro-sized fixed-wing UAVs are increasingly applied in both military and civilian fields. In military applications, they can perform tasks that traditional aircraft struggle to accomplish, such as reconnaissance, surveillance, search and rescue, and special operations. The broad application of UAVs drives the need to cultivate more full-stack engineers specializing in UAV flight control. A full-stack UAV engineer refers to a professional possessing multidisciplinary skills, including UAV hardware and software design, control system development, data processing, and application implementation. To better and more effectively train such full-stack UAV flight control engineers, we have written this book. Its goal is to enable readers with no prior background to quickly get started, master advanced development methodologies, and keep pace with cutting-edge technologies. This book emphasizes fundamentality, completeness, systematicity, and a certain level of technological advancement. It includes eight UAV experiments covering design, modeling, control, path planning, and vision algorithms. The experiments progress gradually from fundamentals to hardware-in-the-loop simulation, providing guidance on using software tools such as MATLAB/Simulink and Python, as well as hardware platforms like CubePilot, aiming to cultivate practical capabilities.

Companion code for this textbook can be downloaded via the RflySim toolchain. After installation, follow the instructions in the table below to navigate to the corresponding chapter folders. Before conducting experiments, please carefully read the Readme.pdf file in each folder. Due to ongoing updates and iterations of RflySim, the specific experimental procedures may differ slightly from those described in the textbook; therefore, the Readme.pdf file should be considered authoritative.

Chapter	Slides	Code
Chapter 1 – Introduction	ppt	None
Chapter 2 – Experimental Platform Configuration and Development Workflow	ppt	code
Chapter 3 – Level Flight Performance Evaluation Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 4 – Modeling of Controlled Dynamic Systems Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 5 – System Identification Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 6 – Low-Level Flight Control Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 7 – Path Following and Planning Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 8 – Trajectory Planning and Differential Flatness Control Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 9 – Image-Based Servoing and Docking Control Experiment	ppt	code
Chapter 10 – Swarm Flight Control Experiment	ppt	code