UAV Control: Introduction

UAV Control presents a very comprehensive treatment of UAV control and related technologies. The inherently unstable nature of typical UAV configurations necessitates a rigorous approach to the analysis and design of UAV control technologies, as well as a thorough understanding of stability issues. Linear Flight Control Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by How, Frazzoli, and Chowdhary presents an overview of linear flight control and guidance methods for UAVs, starting with a discussion of rotation matrices and UAV kinematic equations and followed by derivation of the 6 DOF UAV equations of motion. Equations of motion are then linearized, and several linear multi-loop closure techniques for UAV guidance and control are discussed. Nonlinear Flight Control Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Chowdhary, Frazzoli, How, and Liu discusses nonlinear and adaptive control techniques that are often used to improve UAV performance and reliability. Such techniques are actively being studied to handle nonlinear aerodynamic and kinematic effects, actuator saturations and rate limitations, modeling uncertainty, and time-varying dynamics. An overview of tools and techniques used for designing nonlinear flight controllers is presented along with a summary of Lyapunov stability theory. In detail, the nonlinear control techniques that are considered include gain scheduling, model predictive control, backstepping, dynamic inversion-based control, model reference adaptive control, and model-based fault-tolerant control.