UAV Control and Simulation Using Trajectory Transcriptions

A practice adopted in aircraft control and simulation is to design a linear time-invariant model based controller for each operating point and then schedule these controllers on-line at the inner loop to associate the operating points, which are also referred as equilibrium or trim points. At each of these trim points, the aircraft maintains specific orientation with respect to an inertial frame and offer a flight control mode (FCM) such as an ascent, descent, altitude hold, etc. In accomplishing various mission operations anticipated from an unmanned air vehicle (UAV), either remotely or autonomously, it is often required to fly the UAVs by using several of these FCMs whose nonlinear aircraft trajectories experience transcriptions. Accordingly the controllers are switched. One of the objectives in transcription is to preserve stability while the FCMs transit. In this paper, admissible controller sequence that can be scheduled in order to integrate FCMs through stable trajectory transcriptions is presented. FCMs resulting from static state and output feedback controllers are integrated to accommodate the principal objectives of gain scheduling, control allocation, reconfigurable control, etc. These evolving maneuvers instantaneously demanded in pitch plane are formulated to respond to the requirements originating from situational awareness of a typical UAV.