System identification and stability evaluation of an unmanned aerial vehicle from automated flight tests

This paper presents a consequence of the systematic approach to identify the aerodynamic parameters of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with the automatic flight control system. A 3-2-1-1 excitation is applied for the longitudinal mode while a multi-step input is applied for lateral/directional excitation. Optimal time step for excitation is sought to provide the broad input bandwidth. A fully automated programmed flight test method provides highquality flight data for system identification using the flight control computer with longitudinal and lateral/directional autopilots, which enable the separation of each motion during the flight test. The accuracy of the longitudinal system identification is improved by an additional use of the closed-loop flight test data. A constrained optimization scheme is applied to estimate the aerodynamic coefficients that best describe the time response of the vehicle. An appropriate weighting function is introduced to balance the flight modes. As a result, concurrent system models are obtained for a wide envelope of both longitudinal and lateral/directional flight maneuvers while maintaining the physical meanings of each parameter.