An Underactuated Control System Design for Adaptive Autopilot of Fixed-Wing Drones

An Underactuated Control System Design for Adaptive Autopilot of Fixed-Wing Drones

Baldi, S. (TU Delft Team Bart De Schutter; Southeast University)
Roy, Spandan (International Institute of Information Technology)
Yang, Kang (Southeast University)
Liu, Di (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen; Southeast University)

2022

Effective design of autopilots for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is still a great challenge, due to unmodeled effects and uncertainties that these vehicles exhibit during flight. Unmodeled effects and uncertainties comprise longitudinal/lateral cross-couplings, as well as poor knowledge of equilibrium points (trimming points) of the UAV dynamics. The main contribution of this article is a new adaptive autopilot design, based on uncertain Euler-Lagrange dynamics of the UAV and where the control can explicitly take into account under-actuation in the dynamics, reduced structural knowledge of cross-couplings and trimming points. This system uncertainty is handled via appropriately designed adaptive laws: stability of the controlled UAV is analyzed. Hardware-in-the-loop tests, comparisons with an Ardupilot autopilot and with a robustified autopilot validate the effectiveness of the control design, even in the presence of strong saturation of the UAV actuators.

Adaptive control
Aerodynamics
Autonomous aerial vehicles
Autopilot
autopilot
fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehical (UAV)
Mathematical models
Propellers
Uncertainty
Vehicle dynamics

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9d7f02a4-8d64-4568-b97f-08bb5dd7ee69

https://doi.org/10.1109/TMECH.2022.3144459

1083-4435

IEEE - ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 27 (5), 4045-4056

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 S. Baldi, Spandan Roy, Kang Yang, Di Liu