Unified Velocity Control and Flight State Transition of Unmanned Tilt-Wing Aircraft

Hartmann, Philipp; Meyer, Carsten; Moormann, Dieter

doi:10.2514/1.g002168

Cited by 50 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…The solution could be the use of "hybrid MAVs", which combine the hovering capability of helicopters with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. Many different hybrid MAVs have been designed, such as quadplanes [9], tilt-wings [11] and tailsitters [2]. Each of these vehicles has its own advantages and disadvantages, but what has been holding back the application of hybrids in general, is the fact that they are very difficult to control.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Incremental Control and Guidance of Hybrid Aircraft Applied to a Tailsitter Unmanned Air Vehicle

Smeur

Bronz

Croon

2020

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

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Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combine hovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult to control, because their aerodynamics are hard to model and they are susceptible to wind gusts. This often leads to composite and complex controllers, with different modes for hover, transition and forward flight. In this paper, we propose incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion control for the attitude and position control. The result is a single, continuous controller, that is able to track the desired acceleration of the vehicle across the flight envelope. The proposed controller is implemented on the Cyclone hybrid UAV. Multiple outdoor experiments are performed, showing that unmodeled forces and moments are effectively compensated by the incremental control structure. Finally, we provide a comprehensive procedure for the implementation of the controller on other types of hybrid UAVs.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In such a case, the drone may need to maintain flight in between hover and forward flight. Hartmann et al [11] developed a controller that is able to fly at any airspeed. This allows them to track velocities more accurately and to deal better with wind.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incremental Control and Guidance of Hybrid Aircraft Applied to a Tailsitter Unmanned Air Vehicle

Smeur

Bronz

Croon

2020

Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics

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“…1) Related Work: Existing work on design, modeling and control of tiltwing UAV's considers tandem-wing [4]- [6] and single-wing vehicles [7]- [9]. Employed control systems are either unified [8], [9] or switch between different controllers for hover, transition, and cruise [10]. For both attitude-and velocity control, decoupled PID and full state feedback LQRarchitectures are reported [5], [9], [11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Employed control systems are either unified [8], [9] or switch between different controllers for hover, transition, and cruise [10]. For both attitude-and velocity control, decoupled PID and full state feedback LQRarchitectures are reported [5], [9], [11]. They are typically combined with local linearizations and gain-scheduling to address the strong non-linearities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The good performance of the ACS in the flight-tests indicates that the proposed model structure reasonably trades-off between i) DI-required fidelity and ii) low-computational complexity to remain tangible for use on micro-controllers. The developed cruise control system (CCS) employs a linearized approach similar to that outlined in [9], i.e., it relies on look-up trim-maps (TMs) to determine the nonlinear trim-actuation. However, contrary to [9] where wind-tunnel based TMs are used, we rely on model-based TMs obtained by offline full-state optimization to systematically handle non-uniqueness of the trims.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attitude and Cruise Control of a VTOL Tiltwing UAV

Rohr

Stastny

Verling

et al. 2019

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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This paper presents the mathematical modeling, controller design, and flight-testing of an over-actuated Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) tiltwing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Based on simplified aerodynamics and first-principles, a dynamical model of the UAV is developed which captures key aerodynamic effects including propeller slipstream on the wing and post-stall characteristics of the airfoils. The model-based steady-state flight envelope and the corresponding trim-actuation is analyzed and the overactuation of the UAV solved by optimizing for, e.g., power-optimal trims. The developed control system is composed of two controllers: First, a low-level attitude controller based on dynamic inversion and a daisy-chaining approach to handle allocation of redundant actuators. Secondly, a higher-level cruise controller to track a desired vertical velocity. It is based on a linearization of the system and look-up tables to determine the strong and nonlinear variation of the trims throughout the flight-envelope. We demonstrate the performance of the controlsystem for all flight phases (hover, transition, cruise) in extensive flight-tests.

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Complementary Filter‐Based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Tilt‐Wing UAV

Autenrieb,

Shin

2024

Intl J Robust & Nonlinear

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This article presents an incremental nonlinear model following control (INMFC) strategy for a tilt‐wing vertical take‐off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). To ensure a good and robust regulation performance, a two‐loop feedback controller, based on the incremental backstepping (IBS) methodology, is used to handle uncertainties and external disturbances robustly. In order to ensure a good mode following and to aid the tracking performance of the flight control system, the first and second‐time derivatives of the desired model response, computed by a model reference (MR) system, are either directly used as feedforward signals for the outer loop or are additionally transformed for the inner‐loop by using an incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) grounded approach to transform the signals based on known systems kinematics. In order to uniformly handle the overactuated flight vehicle in both mission model and during the transition, an operation mode‐based weighted incremental linear control allocation approach is applied for safe operation. The performance of the suggested control approach is investigated by utilizing a high‐fidelity nonlinear flight dynamics model of the tilt‐wing system. The results presented in this paper demonstrate that the proposed control approach provides significant benefits for the robust control of the considered tilt‐wing UAV.

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Unified Velocity Control and Flight State Transition of Unmanned Tilt-Wing Aircraft

Cited by 50 publications

References 3 publications

Incremental Control and Guidance of Hybrid Aircraft Applied to a Tailsitter Unmanned Air Vehicle

Incremental Control and Guidance of Hybrid Aircraft Applied to a Tailsitter Unmanned Air Vehicle

Attitude and Cruise Control of a VTOL Tiltwing UAV

Complementary Filter‐Based Incremental Nonlinear Model Following Control Design for a Tilt‐Wing UAV

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