Preview-Based Altitude Control for a Very Flexible Flying Wing with Lidar Wind Measurements

This paper investigates the preview-based altitude control of a very flexible flying wing model. The preview control system employs a two-loop control scheme, which is designed based on the reduced-order linear model. The outer loop employs PI/LADRC (linear active disturbance rejection control) algorithms to track the altitude reference command and generate pitch angle command to the inner loop, based on which the inner loop uses $\mathbf{H}^{\infty}$ preview control to compute the control inputs to the corresponding control effectors. A Lidar (light detection and ranging) simulator is developed to measure the wind disturbances at a distance in front of the aircraft, which are provided to the inner-loop $\mathbf{H}^{\infty}$ preview controller as prior knowledge to improve control performance. Simulation tests are conducted based on the full-order nonlinear model, which show that the preview-based altitude control system achieves better tracking effectiveness and disturbance rejection performance than the baseline non-preview control system.

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