Position Tracking Control of Tailsitter VTOL UAV With Bounded Thrust-Vectoring Propulsion System

This paper presents an adaptive position tracking controller for a special kind of tailsitter vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The distinctive part of this VTOL aircraft is its thrust-vectoring propulsion system, which allows the aircraft to achieve long-range flight at high-efficiency. However, there are two main problems encountered in the control design for this aircraft in vertical mode. One problem is that the mass and inertia tensor are unknown parameters because of the fuel consumption. The other problem is that the thrust vector is bounded both in amplitude and orientation, leading to the boundedness of control input. In this paper, we use a complementary filter to estimate the mass and an adaptive law to compensate the error caused by inertia uncertainty. A Lyapunov-based control law with nested saturation function is proposed to solve the problem of input boundedness. Finally, the global asymptotic stability is proven for the simplified model and the effectiveness is illustrated through simulation.

[1]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Adaptive quaternion control of a miniature tailsitter UAV , 2008, 2008 American Control Conference.

[2]  Andrew Roberts,et al.  Adaptive Position Tracking of VTOL UAVs , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

[3]  Tarek Hamel,et al.  Position control of a ducted fan VTOL UAV in crosswind , 2007, Int. J. Control.

[4]  Tarek Hamel,et al.  Control of Thrust-Propelled Underactuated Vehicles , 2008 .

[5]  Amit Ailon,et al.  Simple Tracking Controllers for Autonomous VTOL Aircraft With Bounded Inputs , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[6]  Zhu Jihong,et al.  Dynamic modelling of a small scale turbojet engine , 2015, 2015 European Control Conference (ECC).

[7]  Kai Liu,et al.  Model and longitudinal hover control of a conceptual thrust-vectored unmanned tail-sitter , 2013, 2013 10th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation (ICCA).

[8]  R. Mehra,et al.  Robust Adaptive Variable Structure Control of Spacecraft Under Control Input Saturation , 2001 .

[9]  R. Mehra,et al.  Robust Tracking Control Design for Spacecraft Under Control Input Saturation , 2004 .

[10]  Peter W. Gibbens,et al.  Flight Testing of the T-Wing Tail-Sitter Unmanned Air Vehicle , 2008 .

[11]  Tarek Hamel,et al.  A Control Approach for Thrust-Propelled Underactuated Vehicles and its Application to VTOL Drones , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[12]  Jinchang Hu,et al.  Globally asymptotically stable saturated PID controllers for a double integrator with constant disturbance: GLOBALLY ASYMPTOTICALLY STABLE SATURATED PID CONTROLLERS , 2014 .

[13]  Xu Yang,et al.  Design and implementation of twin-rotor tail-sitter UAV , 2015, 2015 IEEE Advanced Information Technology, Electronic and Automation Control Conference (IAEAC).

[14]  David Hyunchul Shim,et al.  A Comprehensive Flight Control Design and Experiment of a Tail-Sitter UAV , 2013 .

[15]  David Hyunchul Shim,et al.  Development and Application of Controller for Transition Flight of Tail-Sitter UAV , 2012, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[16]  Nicolas Marchand,et al.  Bounded attitude control of rigid bodies: Real-time experimentation to a quadrotor mini-helicopter , 2011 .

[17]  Abdelkader Abdessameud,et al.  Global trajectory tracking control of VTOL-UAVs without linear velocity measurements , 2010, Autom..

[18]  Yuanqing Xia,et al.  Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Attitude Stabilization With Actuator Saturation , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.

[19]  Ching-Chih Tsai,et al.  Adaptive backstepping integral control of a small‐scale helicopter for airdrop missions , 2010 .

[20]  Mark Euston,et al.  A complementary filter for attitude estimation of a fixed-wing UAV , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[21]  An-Min Zou,et al.  Adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant attitude control of spacecraft , 2011 .

[22]  Honghua Zhang,et al.  Immersion and invariance based command-filtered adaptive backstepping control of VTOL vehicles , 2013, Autom..

[23]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Tailsitter attitude control using resolved tilt-twist , 2014, 2014 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS).

[24]  Bin Yao,et al.  Global stabilization of a chain of integrators with input saturation and disturbances , 2011, Proceedings of the 2011 American Control Conference.

[25]  Stephen Morris,et al.  Quaternion based attitude error for a tailsitter in hover flight , 2014, 2014 American Control Conference.

[26]  An-Min Zou,et al.  Robust attitude tracking control of spacecraft under control input magnitude and rate saturations , 2016 .

[27]  Nicolas Marchand,et al.  Global stabilization of a four rotor helicopter with bounded inputs , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[28]  Kimon P. Valavanis,et al.  A Novel Nonlinear Backstepping Controller Design for Helicopters Using the Rotation Matrix , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology.

[29]  Mirac Aksugur,et al.  2008-01-2242 Hybrid Propulsion System Design of a VTOL Tailsitter UAV , 2008 .

[30]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  Preliminary Modeling, Control, and Trajectory Design for Miniature Autonomous Tailsitters , 2006 .