Attitude Control of a Tilt-rotor Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicle Using Incremental Control

Attitude Control of a Tilt-rotor Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicle Using Incremental Control

Lovell-Prescod, Gervase (TU Delft Aerospace Engineering)

Smeur, E.J.J. (mentor)
Ma, Z. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Aerospace Engineering

2022-11-22

By combining the ability to hover with a wing for fast and efficient horizontal flight, hybrid unmanned aircraft extend the flight envelope and therefore mission capabilities of unmanned aircraft. However, this comes at a cost: increased complexity control-wise and being more susceptible to wind disturbances. This susceptibility to wind gusts is particularly problematic for tailsitters as during hovering and vertical flight their wing is perpendicular to horizontal wind disturbances, often leading to actuator saturation. This paper presents a novel tailsitter micro air vehicle with two leading edge tilting rotors serving as its only actuators. It is shown that thrust vectoring generates sufficient control moment generation alleviating actuator saturation. Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) is implemented for attitude control and is demonstrated to compensate for unmodeled forces and moments whilst only relying on actuator control effectiveness and knowledge of actuator dynamics.

UAV
Hybrid MAVs
Tailsitter
Actuator saturation
Incremental control
INDI
Tilting rotors

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:baf5b7df-0e0f-45da-8b70-c7c95ead79b6

Student theses

master thesis

© 2022 Gervase Lovell-Prescod