Unified Approach for Velocity Control and Flight State Transition of Unmanned Tiltwing Aircraft

Hartmann, Philipp; Meyer, Carsten; Moormann, Dieter

doi:10.2514/6.2016-2101

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Furthermore, the autopilot system must ensure the stability and the tracking of trajectories for all these flight domains which results in a higher degree of challenge and complexity also for the guidance, navigation, and control community. Different hybrid MAV configurations such as tilt-rotors 1 or tilt-wings, 2 quadplanes, 3 and tilt-body or tailsitter 4 can be found in literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model-free control algorithms for micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities

Barth

Condomines

Bronz

et al. 2020

International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles

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Micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities, or simply hybrid micro air vehicles, combine the beneficial features of fixed-wing configurations, in terms of endurance, with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of rotorcrafts to perform five different flight phases during typical missions, such as vertical takeoff, transitioning flight, forward flight, hovering and vertical landing. This promising micro air vehicle class has a wider flight envelope than conventional micro air vehicles, which implies new challenges for both control community and aerodynamic designers. One of the major challenges of hybrid micro air vehicles is the fast variation of aerodynamic forces and moments during the transition flight phase which is difficult to model accurately. To overcome this problem, we propose a flight control architecture that estimates and counteracts in real-time these fast dynamics with an intelligent feedback controller. The proposed flight controller is designed to stabilize the hybrid micro air vehicle attitude as well as its velocity and position during all flight phases. By using model-free control algorithms, the proposed flight control architecture bypasses the need for a precise hybrid micro air vehicle model that is costly and time consuming to obtain. A comprehensive set of flight simulations covering the entire flight envelope of tailsitter micro air vehicles is presented. Finally, real-world flight tests were conducted to compare the model-free control performance to that of the Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion controller, which has been applied to a variety of aircraft providing effective flight performances.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Model-free control algorithms for micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities

Barth

Condomines

Bronz

et al. 2020

International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…There are mainly four categories of VTOL UAVs 4,5 : dual-system (e.g. a quadplane), tilt-rotor, tilt-wing, 6 and tail-sitter. 7 Among them, the tail-sitter VTOL aircrafts are perhaps the simplest implementation as they do not require extra transition actuators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation and flight experiments of a quadrotor tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle with wide flight envelope

Lyu

Zhou

et al. 2018

International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles

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This paper presents the modeling, simulation, and control of a small-scale electric powered quadrotor tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle. In the modeling part, a full attitude wind tunnel test is performed on the full-scale unmanned aerial vehicle to capture its aerodynamics over the flight envelope. To accurately capture the degradation of motor thrust and torque at the presence of the forward speed, a wind tunnel test on the motor and propeller is also carried out. The extensive wind tunnel tests, when combined with the unmanned aerial vehicle kinematics model, dynamics model and other practical constraints such as motor saturation and delay, lead to a complete flight simulator that can accurately reveal the actual aircraft dynamics as verified by actual flight experiments. Based on the developed model, a unified attitude controller and a stable transition controller are designed and verified. Both simulation and experiments show that the developed attitude controller can stabilize the unmanned aerial vehicle attitude over the entire flight envelope and the transition controller can successfully transit the unmanned aerial vehicle from vertical flight to level flight with negligible altitude dropping, a common and fundamental challenge for tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing aircrafts. Finally, when supplied with the designed controller, the tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle can achieve a wide flight speed envelope ranging from stationary hovering to fast level flight. This feature dramatically distinguishes our aircraft from conventional fixed-wing airplanes.

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Mission Control Concept for Parcel Delivery Operations Based on a Tiltwing Aircraft System

Schütt

Hartmann

Holsten

et al. 2017

Advances in Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control

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Unified Approach for Velocity Control and Flight State Transition of Unmanned Tiltwing Aircraft

Cited by 7 publications

References 3 publications

Model-free control algorithms for micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities

Model-free control algorithms for micro air vehicles with transitioning flight capabilities

Simulation and flight experiments of a quadrotor tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle with wide flight envelope

Mission Control Concept for Parcel Delivery Operations Based on a Tiltwing Aircraft System

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