A Fast and Efficient Attitude Control Algorithm of a Tilt-Rotor Aerial Platform Using Inputs Redundancies

Su, Yao; Ruan, Lecheng; Yu, Pengkang; Pi, Chen-Huan; Gerber, Matthew J.; Tsao, Tsu‐Chin

doi:10.1109/lra.2021.3138806

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The tilt angle command gradually increases from 0.5 s and completely reaches the FW mode at 3 s. The sinusoidal command signals for roll and pitch torque are given during the whole simulation. We compare the basic FD-based method (B-FD) from [9,16,17], which is suitable and widely used for tilt-rotor UAV. For the actuator constraints, we adopt (CGI) into the FD-based method using a coordinate transformation and priority setting, the CGI method we use is originated from [21].…”

Section: Simulation 1: Manoeuvring In Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many studies designed the controllers for these types of aircraft by separating the dynamics into two parts: (і) treating the aircraft as a rigid body that moved freely in 3D space driven by virtual control inputs, and (іі) force and torque generated by the actuators. A hierarchical control structure including position, attitude loop, and control allocation is the most widely used strategy [9]. In the standard approach, feedback linearization combined with a cascade PID controller is utilized to design the virtual input for the attitude control loop, and gain scheduling is used to deal with the damping change at different airspeeds for tilt‐rotor VTOL because of the static stability provided by the aerodynamics in FW mode [10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The hierarchical control allocator can be used in all the flight mode, which is clearly different from the iterative allocation method such as in [11, 13, 15, 27]. CGI is subtly adopted to the FD‐based method to deal with the input constraints issue, which is clearly different from the optimization‐based methods as in [9, 17, 28]. A novel smooth strategy using Sucher Compliment is proposed so that the weight of the constraints on the forward force can be gradually reduced in transition to avoid signal jump for actuators’ input, which never has been developed in other works related to DEP‐VTOL aircraft.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A smooth control allocation method for a distributed electric propulsion VTOL aircraft test platform

Qin¹,

Liu²,

Zhao³

2023

IET Control Theory & Appl

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Distributed electronic propulsion (DEP) aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) ability mostly equipped with multiple redundant tiltable propulsors, which are used to provide not only thrusts, but also control torque in all flight mode. The features make the control allocation problem of these aircraft both complex and important. Therefore, this paper proposes: (і) a prototype platform for DEP VTOL aircraft that allows researchers to design and analyse control allocation strategies, and (іі) a uniform hierarchical control allocation method that can be adapted to both MC and FW modes. The platform contains ten fully actuated thrusters, which are distributed in the scaled geometry of a typical DEP-VTOL aircraft. The proposed control allocation strategy uses hierarchical structure to avoid high-dimensional matrix operations for the redundant actuators. The additional constraints on the thrust and tilt angles of the actuators are addressed by adopting cascade generalized inversion (CGI) to force decompensation (FD)-based methods by a coordinate transformation. A novel smooth strategy through Schur Complement is also presented to achieve steady and smooth transition from MC to FW mode. Finally, the proposed method is implemented in the authors' novel platform in both simulations and flight experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness and smoothness.

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Section: Simulation 1: Manoeuvring In Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

A smooth control allocation method for a distributed electric propulsion VTOL aircraft test platform

Qin¹,

Liu²,

Zhao³

2023

IET Control Theory & Appl

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“…When propeller failure happens, different from other over-actuated UAV configurations that the propeller-motor pair and related servo motors have to be given up, the lowlevel input redundancy in our platform, offers partial thrust generation capability which could prevent the platform from crashing with more weights onboard. Besides, the auxiliary inputs can be controlled to improve control performance (e.g., as done in [11,40]) because the dynamics of each motor are sufficiently fast and can be regarded as feed-through dynamics.…”

Section: Platform Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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Propeller failure is one major reason for the falling and crashing of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While conventional multirotors can barely handle this issue due to underactuation, over-actuated platforms can still pursue the flight with proper fault-tolerant control (FTC). This paper investigates such a controller for one such over-actuated multirotor aerial platform composing quadcopters mounted on passive joints with input redundancy in both the high-level vehicle control and the low-level quadcopter control of vectored thrusts. To fully utilize the input redundancies of the whole platform under propeller failure, our proposed FTC controller has a hierarchical control architecture with three main components: (i) a low-level adjustment strategy to avoid propeller-level thrust saturation; (ii) a compensation loop to attenuate introduced disturbance; (iii) a nullspace-based control allocation framework to avoid quadcopter-level thrust saturation. Through reallocating actuator inputs in both the low-level and high-level control loops, the low-level quadcopter control can be maintained with at most two failed propellers and the whole platform can be stabilized without crashing. The proposed controller is extensively studied in both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate its superior performance.

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