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

Journal article (2022)

Authors

S. Baldi Southeast University, Team Bart De Schutter - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering
Spandan Roy International Institute of Information Technology
Kang Yang Southeast University
Di Liu Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Southeast University
Research Group
Team Bart De Schutter (Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2022 S. Baldi, Spandan Roy, Kang Yang, Di Liu
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TMECH.2022.3144459
Adaptive control Uncertainty Aerodynamics Vehicle dynamics Propellers Autopilot Mathematical models Autonomous aerial vehicles Autopilot Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehical (UAV)
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Published Date

2022

Language

English

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Faculty

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Department

Delft Center for Systems and Control

Research Group

Team Bart De Schutter

Abstract

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.