The modern aerospace controls engineer is provided with a variety of powerful tools to aid in the design and testing of digital flight control systems. The current fiscal environment requires extensive validation of all aerospace based systems through simulation and hardware-in-the-loop testing prior to implementation. This work explores the design and evaluation of an Automatic Flight Control System (AFCS) for the Bluebird Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Software tools such as MATLAB and MATRIXx are used to evaluate the dynamic stability of the aircraft model and Linear Quadratic Gaussian algorithms are used to obtain the appropriate controller. Graphical design applications such as SIMULINK and SystemBuild are then used to build a visual block diagram model of the aircraft dynamics and link it with the designed controller. Using this model, the control system response to commanded inputs and external disturbances was evaluated.http://archive.org/details/designndevaluati1094530934NANAU.S. Navy (U.S.N.) author
