A new landing strategy is presented for manned electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, using a roll maneuver to obtain a trajectory in the horizontal plane. This strategy rejects the altitude surging in the landing process, which is the fatal drawback of the conventional jumping strategy. The strategy leads to a smoother transition from the wing-borne mode to the thrust-borne mode, and has a higher energy efficiency, meaning a better flight experience and higher economic performance. To employ the strategy, a five-stage maneuver is designed, using the lateral maneuver instead of longitudinal climbing. Additionally, a control system based on L1 adaptive control theory is designed to assist manned driving or execute flight missions independently, consisting of the guidance logic, stability augmentation system and flight management unit. The strategy is verified with the ET120 platform, by Monte Carlo simulation for robustness and safety performance, and an experiment was performed to compare the benefits with conventional landing strategies. The results show that the performance of the control system is robust enough to reduce perturbation by at least 20% in all modeling parameters, and ensures consistent dynamic characteristics between different flight modes. Additionally, the strategy successfully avoids climbing during the landing process with a smooth trajectory, and reduces the energy consumed for landing by 64%.

This work provides a feasible solution to the shipborne short landing problem for thrust-vectoring V/STOL vehicles. The short takeoff and shipborne rolling vertical landing strategy was designed in this work. First, the strategy design reference was established by flying performance and mission requirements, including the short takeoff and landing performance, deceleration performance, trajectory stability, velocity stability, and conversion corridor, using attainable equilibrium set methods based on the six dimensions of freedom model of the study object. Then, a piecewise short takeoff landing strategy was designed based on the references, together with a nonlinear dynamic inverse-based control designed frame for strategy execution. Finally, the hardware-in-loop Monte-Carlo simulation was implemented for the strategy feasibility verification. The proposed short takeoff and landing strategy satisfies the shipborne short takeoff and landing mission requirements. The short takeoff shortens the taxiing distance by 40% compared to a normal takeoff. With a 20% perturbance on all model parameters, the touchdown speed can be controlled to 14 ± 1 m/s, and the landing point position can be constrained inside a 5 m radius circle with almost zero lateral displacements.

A practical vertical takeoff and acceleration strategy is developed for manned electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, with a simple vehicle operation principle defined. Firstly, a 6-DOF model is established for 120 kg reduced-scale protype electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, with its physical control principles illustrated. Then, a simple vehicle operation method is defined for the vehicle, where the conventional operation method for fixed-wings and helicopters is considered for a friendly stick response definition for pilots with different backgrounds. The defined simple vehicle operation principles are realized by a control architecture with a linear-active-disturbance-rejection-control-based inner loop stability augmentation system and an airspeed-based mode selection outer loop. This system is then used to perform a four-stage vertical takeoff and acceleration strategy, which targets at a smooth and safe transition. The Monte Carlo simulation results and the strategy simulations prove that the proposed strategy, which achieves the design target perfectly, can be easily performed with the developed simple vehicle operation system, and that it has sufficient robustness performance to reject at least 20% of the model’s uncertainties.

Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs) are a novel class of transportation that can facilitate point-to-point travel. However, the control of eVTOLs traversing from the gyro to the fixedwing flight mode poses daunting challenges in the context of modeling, the design of the control algorithm, flight management, simulation, verification, and testing. This paper proposes the design of an 1-augmented autopilot that is implemented on the 120-kg-class large-scale Electric Transportation 120 platform of the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, Ltd. Significant advances in fast rotor modeling according to blade element momentum theory, virtual flight test techniques in wind tunnels, a layered design of the architecture for flight management, and fast techniques for validation and verification speed-up the development of the flight control system (FCS). The state-of-the-art 1 adaptive control architecture combined with dynamic inversion type control allocator is particularly suitable for dealing with nonaffine control problems encountered with aerodynamic uncertainties. Implement of 1 adaptive control theory significantly reduces the parameter tuning cycle to achieve the desired closed-loop tracking performance. Real-word flight tests have confirmed the effectiveness of 1-augmented algorithm and customized FCS.INDEX TERMS blade element momentum theory, electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle, flight control system, flight test, 1 adaptive control, virtual flight test