Incremental Control and Guidance of Hybrid Aircraft Applied to a Tailsitter Unmanned Air Vehicle

摘要

Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combinehovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult tocontrol, because their aerodynamics are hard to model and they are susceptible to wind gusts. This often leads tocomposite and complex controllers, with different modes for hover, transition, and forward flight. This paperproposes incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion control for the attitude and position control. The result is a single,continuous controller that is able to track the desired acceleration of the vehicle across the flight envelope. Theproposed controller is implemented on the Cyclone hybrid unmanned air vehicle. Multiple outdoor experiments areperformed, showing that unmodeled forces and moments are effectively compensated by the incremental controlstructure. Finally, this paper provides a comprehensive procedure for the implementation of the controller on othertypes of hybrid unmanned air vehicles.