Preliminary design of a fixed-winged UAV autopilot for take-off phase and its assessment

The paper proposes a preliminary design of an autopilot for a fixed-winged UA. The autopilot solution was implemented in a Python on a Raspberry Pi development board. The system was fully integrated into a software-in-the-loop setup, where X-plane 11 was used to simulate the flight of the aircraft. As the airplane model, Embention F300 was used. The paper addresses pre-flight checks, and then the initial phase of the flight - take-off. The autopilot was tested on a range of airfields and under different weather conditions. To assess the performance of the proposed autopilot, a comparison with COTS autopilot Embention Veronte was performed as well.