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

Master Thesis (2022)
Author(s)

G.H.L.H. Lovell-Prescod (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)

Contributor(s)

Ewoud Smeur – Mentor (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

Z. Ma – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright
© 2022 Gervase Lovell-Prescod
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2022
Language
English
Copyright
© 2022 Gervase Lovell-Prescod
Graduation Date
22-11-2022
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
Aerospace Engineering
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Abstract

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.

Files

License info not available