Development of an Autonomous Flight Control System for a Distributed Electric Propulsion Flying Model

The scope of this work is the realization of a fully automated testing campaign, through the development of an autonomous Flight Control System (FCS), in order to support the model identification of a Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP) scaled demonstrator. The autopilot has been used to follow a GPS trajectory, reach trim conditions, execute the required maneuvers, define and tune specific control actions and carry out automatic safety checks. The chosen software environment is PX4, an open-source professional autopilot, which has been extended and customized to carry out the flight operations needed for parametric identification, while fulfilling functional and safety-related requirements. In addition, a simulation environment has been set up for software testing and pre-flight configuration. The result is a fully automated platform for flight testing and advanced research within DEP models.