Design and Validation of Disturbance Rejection Dynamic Inverse Control for a Tailless Aircraft in Wind Tunnel

Abstract

This paper focuses on the design of a disturbance rejection controller for a tailless aircraft based on the technique of nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI). The tailless aircraft model mounted on a three degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) dynamic rig in the wind tunnel is modeled as a nonlinear affine system subject to mismatched disturbances. First of all, a baseline NDI attitude controller is designed for sufficient stability and good reference tracking performance of the nominal system. Then, a nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO) is supplemented to the baseline NDI controller to estimate the lumped disturbances for compensation, including unmodeled dynamics, parameter uncertainties, and external disturbances. Mathematical analysis demonstrates the convergence of the employed NDO and the resulting closed-loop system. Furthermore, an anti-windup modification is applied to the NDO for control performance preserving in the presence of actuator saturation. Subsequently, the designed control schemes are preliminarily validated and compared via simulations. The baseline NDI controller demonstrates satisfactory attitude tracking performance in the case of nominal simulation; the NDO augmented NDI controller presents significantly improved ability of disturbance rejection when compared with the baseline NDI controller in the case of robust simulation; the anti-windup modified scheme, rather than the baseline NDI controller nor the NDO augmented NDI controller, can preserve the closed-loop performance in the case of actuator saturation. Finally, the baseline NDI scheme and the NDO augmented NDI scheme are implemented and further validated in the wind tunnel flight tests, which demonstrate that the experimental results are in good agreement with that of the simulations.

Editorial for the Special Issue “Aircraft Modeling and Simulation”

“…In the third area, focused on controls, one paper was written on the design and wind tunnel test validation of a disturbance rejection dynamic inverse control for a tailless aircraft [5].…”

“…In [5], the design and wind tunnel tests of the validation of a disturbance rejection dynamic inverse control for a tailless aircraft are presented. In this paper, nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI)-based disturbance rejection control methodologies were designed, and then wind tunnel tests were used to validate the numerical methodologies' results.…”

Design of Pseudo-Command Restricted Controller for Tailless Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Attainable Moment Set

“…Focusing on low-aspect-ratio tailless aircraft, a disturbance-resistant controller based on NDI is designed to complete an experiment of wind tunnels with 3-DOF, which takes the limitations of the effectors into account [11]. The Innovative Control Effector (ICE) aircraft is a low-aspect-ratio tailless aircraft that was especially designed for its high maneuverability, which makes it more suitable for the research scenario presented in this paper.…”