Design and Testing Low Altitude Hovering Control for ITB Flying Car Prototype

Abstract

The flying car of Personal Aerial Vehicle (PAV) concept is a class of light aircraft that have capability and designed to make flying operation likes driving a car. This concept becomes famous day by day followed by some kind of prototype that has been developed by some research center from wide world. The main advantages from the flying car is to have capability to take off and landing in almost everywhere. But this capability need some extra control system to make this concept will work correctly. One of the most important control for this flying car prototype is altitude control, especially on take off and low altitude hovering. The main control and navigation board of this prototype actually already equipped with barometric and GPS altitude sensor. But both of them have very poor in resolution and not enough to used it on take off and low altitude hovering mode. Ultrasound sensor has better resolution but very limited range, but this characteristic could fill the weakness existing sensor on the low altitude level.

This paper will present the characteristic of the flying car prototype and the design of low altitude control system, include with some testing result. Some control methods will be introduced on this research work. Step by step testing has been carried out, to reduce time and cost during this development.