IEEE SPONSORED 2ND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ELETRONICS AND COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
(ICECS 2015)
Design and Simulation of Longitudinal Autopilot
Modes for a Conventional Aircraft
K. David Solomon Raj
Lecturer, Dept. of Avionics
JNT University, Kakinada
Andhra Pradesh, India
k.rajusolomon@gmail.com
Abstract—This paper is concerned with design of an autopilot
for longitudinal flight control of a conventional airplane. There
are different modes of automatic longitudinal flight controls.
Among those pitch attitude hold, altitude hold and vertical speed
hold mode autopilots are implemented in which controller is
designed for each of these modes. By the use of this controller, the
system performance is improved. The performance requirements
such as the peak overshoot to be less than 15% and the rise time
to be less than 1 second has been achieved by the use of each
controller in different modes. Traditional control techniques such
as PID controller and Lead-Lag controllers are designed to each
of these autopilot modes. Root-locus design technique is applied
for tuning the parameters of each controller. Simulation of
autopilots in the presence of three different types of atmospheric
disturbances such as Dryden wind gust, Vertical wind gust model
and turbulence are also observed. As in effect due to disturbance
on each mode, a pitch rate feedback is applied in the inner loop
of pitch controller. So a feedback control loop is developed to
design the autopilot.
Keywords—autopilot; pitch hold mode; altitue hold mode;
vertical speed hold mode; atmospheric disturbances
I. INTRODUCTION
As the range of present day aircrafts is so much increased
allowing a flight of many hours, the continuous attention of
pilot during the flight led to serious fatigue. Hence to provide
relief to the pilot “Autopilot” is invented. An autopilot is a
system used to guide the vehicle without the intervention of
pilot. Good use of an autopilot helps automate the process of
guiding and controlling the aircraft. Autopilots can automate
tasks, such as maintaining an altitude, climbing or descending
to an assigned altitude, turning to and maintaining an assigned
heading, intercepting a course, guiding the aircraft between
waypoints, and flying a precision or non-precision approach.
Advanced autopilots can do much more, carrying out even
highly precise maneuvers, such as landing an aircraft in
conditions of zero visibility.
The autopilot controller will form the outer feedback
control loop which will be closed around the inner
aerodynamic plant. Depending on the control surfaces an
autopilot is controlled, they are broadly classified as
longitudinal autopilots and lateral autopilots. In this paper,
longitudinal autopilot modes are designed for a conventional
aircraft. There are different modes of longitudinal autopilot. In
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P. Raj Kumar
PG Scholar, Dept. of Avionics
JNT University, Kakinada
Andhra Pradesh, India
prince_rajkumar7@yahoo.com
this paper, 3 different modes are designed among them. They
are pitch attitude hold, altitude hold and vertical speed hold.
In recent years, considerable research into the design of
algorithms for autopilots using modern control theory has
been made. Despite their success, only a small number of
implementations of these systems have been reported and it
appears that there is not much enthusiasm to use them due to
their complexity, nonlinear nature, and computation cost.
On the other hand, classical autopilots such as PID and
Lead-Lag autopilots have been successfully integrated as real-
time control systems. This is not only due to their simple
structure and easy implementation, but also to their adequate
performances. However, for successful implementation of
such controllers, parameter adjustment or tuning procedure is
needed if enhanced performance is to be achieved through the
operating envelope. The tuning process, where to obtain the
optimum values for the controller parameters is a critical
challenge. Many studies were conducted to find the best way
for tuning these parameters in order to get adequate
performances such as fast response, zero steady-state error and
minimum overshoot. Even though there are only three
parameters for PID and two parameters for lead-lag
controllers, the parameter tuning is a difficult process because
it must satisfy complex criteria within the limitations of
system actuators [1].
The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2
discuss on aerodynamic model of the reference aircraft and
three different autopilot modes along with disturbances.
Section 3 discuss on implementation of each autopilot. Section
4 presents experimental analysis and results for each mode.
II. SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
A. Reference Aircraft
Piper PA-28-236-DAKOTA is taken as a reference
aircraft. It is all-metal, unpressurized, single-engined, piston-
powered airplane with low-mounted, semi tapered wings and
tricycle landing gear. Its landing gear is such that it could land
on earth or on water. Longitudinal aerodynamics of this
aircraft is established. An effort to develop autopilot system to
stabilize the aircraft longitudinally in cruise condition is done.
B. Aerodynamic Model of Piper Aircraft
To obtain the transfer function of a rigid symmetric aircraft
it is first necessary to obtain the equations of motion for the
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aircraft [2]. These equations of motion, popularly known as 6 -

DOF (Degrees Of Freedom) equations account for all the
forces and moments acting on the aircraft. Among them 3
equations tell about the lateral motion of aircraft and other 3 Fig. 1. Pitch Hold Autopilot
equations tell about the longitudinal motion of aircraft. ii) Altitude Hold Autopilot Mode
The equations guiding the longitudinal motion of aircraft Altitude hold allows an aircraft to be held at a certain
are [3]: altitude. The transfer function that represents altimeter
§ x · model to target aircraft is not used. Instead, a pitch hold
¦F x m¨U  WQ ¸
© ¹
control loop is used to control the altitude.
(1)
§ x
·
¦F z m¨W  UQ ¸
© ¹
x
dh
¦M QIy
ș
By expanding this equation about pitching moment, the
relationship between pitching moment and elevator deflection dt
is given by the equation 2. Fig. 2. Relation between pitch and altitude

C mu c Iy x c (2) dh

U0
u
2U 0
Cmx 
D qSc
q
2U 0
C mq q C mG e G e h(t ) ³ dt ³ (tan T )dT (5)
By applying Laplace transformation to the equation (2) The pitch attitude hold autopilot and its augmented
and substituting the values of stability derivatives, the transfer aerodynamic model is used as the basic block on which the
IXQFWLRQ UHODWLRQVKLS EHWZHHQ SLWFK DWWLWXGH ș  DQG HOHYDWRU altitude hold auto pilot is designed [5]. The classical
deflection ( G e ) is given by the equation 3 altitude hold autopilot architecture is shown in Fig 3.
T ( s) 160 s 2  512 s  280
(3)
G e ( s) s 4  5.03s 3  40.21s 2  1.5s  2.4
The transfer function relationship between pitch rate (q or
x
T ) and elevator deflection ( G e ) is given by equation 4[4]
q( s) 160 s 3  512 s 2  280 s
(4) Fig. 3. Altitude Hold Autopilot
G e ( s) s 4  5.03s 3  40.21s 2  1.5s  2.4
iii) Vertical Speed Hold Mode
This is the required longitudinal aerodynamic model of the
Vertical speed of aircraft can also be interpreted as
reference aircraft. An autopilot is designed for this model to
the altitude rate of aircraft.
control the longitudinal motion of aircraft.
C. Longitudinal Modes of Autopilot d (6)
vs (t ) h(t )
In this paper, longitudinal flight control of Piper aircraft is dt
done by controlling 3 aspects of longitudinal flight i.e., pitch To hold the vertical speed also, the pitch attitude hold
attitude control, altitude control and vertical speed control. pilot and its augmented aerodynamic model is used as the
Flight has to reach the command position with a good basic block on which the vertical speed hold auto pilot is
response time and should maintain that position even in the designed[5]. The classical vertical speed hold autopilot
presence of atmospheric disturbances. architecture is shown in Fig 4.
i) Pitch Attitude Hold Mode
Automatic longitudinal control of an aircraft is
implemented by means of pitch attitude commands. Due to the
control of pitch attitude alone is of limited usefulness, rather
than using this autopilot as a stand-alone controller it is used
in the inner loop of other autopilots, such as altitude hold and
vertical speed hold. Therefore, the pitch attitude control will Fig. 4. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot
be designed initially in this section. The basic architecture of a
pitch attitude hold control system is shown in Fig 1 D. Atmospheric Disturbances effecting longitudinal aircraft
motion
Tc + Pitch Ge Pitch ș Any autopilot which is to control the autonomous motion
Controller Transfer of aircraft has to be designed in such a way that they are
Function

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resistant to the atmospheric disturbances because the The two 2nd order equations in the denominator term
atmosphere is rarely calm but usually is characterized by represents two modes of aircraft response namely short period
winds, gusts, and turbulence. Hence, it is also realistic to take mode and phugoid mode. By inspecting the denominator
the effects of external disturbance influence into account on equation, damping ratios ȗ and natural frequencies Ȧ n for both
the aircraft response dynamics. short period oscillations and phugoid mode can be known.
In this paper, the autopilot in different modes is tested in
the presence of 3 different types of atmospheric disturbances.
They are:
TABLE I. SYSTEM PARAMETERS
i) Vertical wind gust
These are the wind gusts which effect the vertical
direction of aircraft. They take place over an area. Any Parameter Short period Phugoid mode
aircraft entering this area in upward wind gust condition oscillation mode
will experience a pitch up because of the gust hitting the
nose of aircraft. As the aircraft leaves this area it will 'DPSLQJUDWLR ȗ 0.395 0.061
experience a pitch down because of gust hitting the tail of
aircraft. Hence in MATLAB simulation in this paper, this
disturbance is characterized by a square signal. Natural 6.324 0.245
IUHTXHQF\ Ȧ n )
ii) Turbulence
In turbulence conditions the flow of wind has no From the values of Table I, it is clear that the system’s
specific direction. It will be random. When an aircraft transient response is oscillatory. As the system has a good
enters into such environment, the effect of turbulence will steady state response but poor transient response, lead
be much severe. The pitch of aircraft will be in a random compensator is used to compensate the system.
fashion. In this project, in MATLAB simulation, For the system to attain a peak overshoot of less than 15%
turbulence in atmosphere is characterized by Gaussian and rise time less than 1s, the system’s damping ratio should
noise. be ȗ !  DQG QDWXUDO IUHTXHQF\ VKRXOG EH Ȧ n > 2.76. The
design of lead compensator is done by using root locus
iii) Dryden Wind Gust Model technique of pole placement.
By knowing aircraft’s parameters the effect of The transfer function of the compensator circuit is
turbulence on aircraft is calculated by many observatories.
Dryden wind gust model is the product of such s3 (8)
observatory. By knowing the aircraft’s present altitude, D( s) 1.5
s  20
horizontal speed and DCM (Direction Cosine Matrix)
which accounts for change in reference axis due to gust,
the effect of turbulence on linear velocities and angular
moments can be calculated.
In MATLAB simulation, Dryden wind turbulence
model is the Dryden spectral representation to add wind
turbulence to aircraft model by passing band limited white
noise through appropriate forming filters. This block Fig. 5. Simulation of Pitch Hold Autopilot with Lead Compensator
implements the mathematical representation in military Fig. 5 shows the MATLAB simulation of pitch hold
specification MIL-F-8785C. For an aircraft flying at speed autopilot with compensator in series with aircraft dynamics.
V through a frozen turbulence field with a spatial The use of this controller will yield a smooth response with
IUHTXHQF\RIȍUDGLDQVSHUPHWHUWKHFLUFXODUIUHTXHQF\Ȧ reduced oscillations.
LVFDOFXODWHGE\PXOWLSO\LQJ9E\ȍ
B. Altitude Hold Autopilot
III. AUTOPILOT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT For the design of altitude hold autopilot, pitch control
autopilot is used in the inner loop. From the uncompensated
Autopilot is designed for 3 different modes. The response of this mode it is inferred that a PID controller
performance of these is tested in the presence of atmospheric should be used.
disturbance as well. Zeigler-Nichols method is used for tuning PID
A. Pitch Hold Autopilot parameters[6]. Manual tuning is done initially to obtain the
Equation 3 gives the relationship between pitch and critical gain first.
TABLE II ZEIGLER-NICHOLS METHOD
elevator deflection of aircraft. The pole-zero-gain
representation of equation 3 is equation7. Control Type Kp Ki Kd

T ( s) 160( s  2.5)( s  0.7) 1.2K p /

(7)
G e ( s) ( s  5s  40)( s 2  0.03s  0.06)
2
PI 0.45·K c Pc -

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PID 0.6·K c 2K p / P c KpPc / 8

Here K c is the critical gain at which the system starts to
oscillate and P c is the corresponding time period. By tuning
these values, the PID controller for altitude hold autopilot is
obtained as
0.01 (9)
D ( s ) 0.3   0.008s
s

Fig. 8. Simulation of Pitch hold Autopilot in the presence of Vertical wind

Fig. 6. Simulation of Altitude Hold Autopilot with PID controller
Fig. 6 shows the MATLAB simulation of altitude hold
autopilot with PID controller forming the outer loop. The use
of this controller will yield a smooth response with reduced
oscillations.
C. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot
For the design of vertical speed hold autopilot, pitch
control autopilot is used in the inner loop. From the
uncompensated response of this mode it is inferred that a PI
controller should be used. Zeigler-Nichols method is used.
Table II is used to tune the parameters of PI. By this method,
the controller transfer function is achieved to be
0.7
D( s) 0.02  (10)
s
Fig. 7. Simulation of Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot with PI controller
Fig. 7 shows the MATLAB simulation of vertical speed
hold autopilot with PI controller forming the outer loop. The
use of this controller will yield a smooth response with
reduced oscillations.
D. Autopilot in the presence of Atmospheric Disturbances
In this section, autopilot designed for different modes is
tested in the presence of 3 types of atmospheric disturbances.
Let the autopilot be first tested in the presence of a simple
of 3 atmospheric disturbances- Vertical wind gust. As the
pitch hold autopilot is the basic for any longitudinal autopilots,
it is tested first.
gust
From the simulation result in Fig. 8, it is clear that the
basic autopilot is having a considerable effect due to a simple
disturbance, which means all other modes will have effect due
to atmospheric disturbance. Hence to reduce this effect a pitch
rate feedback is incorporated in the inner loop of Pitch hold
loop.
Fig. 9. Simulation of Pitch Hold Autopilot with a pitch rate feedback in the
inner loop
By incorporating pitch rate feedback in the inner loop of
pitch controller, pitch hold autopilot yields a smooth response
[7].
As the atmospheric disturbances will cause a disturbance at
the aerodynamic movements, these disturbances are added in
the inner loop. This is also tested for other autopilot modes
which use pitch autopilot in their inner loops; namely altitude
hold and vertical speed hold autopilots will also yield a
smooth response.
The simulation results for each of the autopilot mode
against each disturbance are shown in next section.
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS
The simulation results of the closed loop system are based
on the aircraft longitudinal motion model (3) and in case of the
use of pitch rate feedback; results are based on model (4).
A. Performance of Autopilot without the presence of
Atmospheric Disturbances

Fig. 10. Pitch Hold Autopilot (Compensated (solid blue) vs.

Uncompensated (dashed black))

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Fig. 11. Altitude Hold Autopilot with PID controller

Fig. 14. Altitude Hold Autopilot in Vertical gust (with pitch rate feedback
(solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))

Fig.12. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot with PI controller

B. Performance of Autopilot in the presence of Atmospheric

Disturbances
Now each autopilot modes namely Pitch hold, Altitude
hold and Vertical speed hold modes are simulated in the
presence of different types of atmospheric disturbances.
i) Vertical Gust

Fig. 15. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot in Vertical gust (with pitch rate
feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))

ii) Dryden Wind Gust Model

Fig. 13. Pitch Hold Autopilot in Vertical gust (with pitch rate feedback
(solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))

Fig. 16. Pitch Hold Autopilot in Dryden wind gust model (with pitch rate
feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))

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Fig. 17. Altitude Hold Autopilot in Dryden wind gust model (with pitch
rate feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))
Fig. 18. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot in Dryden wind gust model (with
pitch rate feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))
iii) Wind Turbulence
Fig. 19. Pitch Hold Autopilot in Wind Turbulence (with pitch rate feedback
(solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))
Fig. 20. Altitude Hold Autopilot in Wind Turbulence (with pitch rate
feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))
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Fig. 21. Vertical Speed Hold Autopilot in Wind Turbulence (with pitch rate
feedback (solid blue) vs. without pitch rate feedback (dashed black))
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, the study methods and results have been
presented. This paper presents the longitudinal aerodynamic
model of a Piper aircraft. Based on this model, pitch attitude
hold, altitude hold and vertical speed hold auto pilot control
functions were achieved in order to realize command control
characteristics. Lead compensator and PID Controller provides
very often the potentiality to significantly improve the
performance, if the process has a second order dominant
dynamics, the zero introduced in the controller by the
derivative action can be adopted to cancel the fastest pole of
the process transfer function.
The longitudinal autopilot is also tested in the presence of
atmospheric disturbances. Autopilot effect due to Dryden
wind gust model, turbulence and vertical wind gust model are
simulated. Pitch rate feedback is used in the inner loop of
pitch control to reduce the effect of atmospheric disturbances.
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