Automatic control of convertible fixed-wing drones with vectorized thrust

Abstract

This paper proposes a control design strategy, encompassing trajectory tracking and path following, for a category of convertible aircraft with fixed wings and vectorized thrust, as exemplified by the Harrier jet aircraft and the V-22 Osprey. The approach relies on, and extends, previous works on the control of hovering vehicles (helicopters, quadrotors,...), axisymmetric devices (rockets, missiles,...), and fixed-wing aircraft (airplanes). In particular it exploits a common nonlinear model of aerodynamic forces exerted on the vehicle, both simple and representative of the underlying physics. Besides the unifying property of this approach, the proposed solution addresses the delicate transition problem between hovering and cruising flight, and thus the concomitant thrust tilting issue, in a novel manner with the possibility of continuously minimizing the thrust intensity, and thus energy expenditure.

Towards a new design with generic modeling and adaptive control of a transformable quadrotor

“…Tilt-rotor UAVs have been proposed in different research works (21,(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56) , and tilt-body UAVs were presented in Refs (16,57,58) , are another category of transformable UAVs that presents several advantages such as enhanced agility and precision, high endurance and maneuverability, adjustment of the thrust force by compensation in the event of a breakdown, horizontal and vertical displacement, elimination of the over-actuation problem and higher speed. However, the main disadvantage of tilting rotors is their poor hover performance caused by the small rotor diameters and large rotor mast.…”

Data-Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning for Attitude Control of Fixed-Wing UAVs: Field Experiments

“…Many challenging control problems arise during advanced operation of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), such as aerobatic maneuvering [9], perching [14], deep-stall landing [29], recovery from loss of control [15], flying in strong wind fields [27], or performing VTOL transitions between hover and forward flight [4]. Fixed-wing UAVs, as illustrated in Fig.…”