Design of Flight Control System for a Novel Tilt-Rotor UAV

Chen, Zaibin; Jia, Haiqiang

doi:10.1155/2020/4757381

Cited by 27 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…This solution shows promising potential, as actuation can be achieved with a minimum of two actuators, unlike dual system convertiplanes, leading to an increase in payload carrying capacity and a reduction in wing loading, as changing the orientation of the rotor shafts leads to the transition without affecting the structural integrity of the vehicle, unlike tail sitter UAVs, and is more robust and adaptable to crosswind condition, unlike tilt wings [5,12]. Few design concepts of VTOL tilt-rotors have been explored in the past, but the major research focus of past researchers was on the quad-copter or tricopter design [14,15] and the conceptualization of robust control schemes for flight transition [15][16][17]. However, this paper focusses on achieving the same idea with a minimum number of actuators and on formulating mathematical modelling that will aid in robust control scheme implementation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

Panigrahi

Krishna

Thondiyath

2021

Sensors

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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have slowly but steadily emerged as a research and commercial hotspot because of their widespread applications. Due to their agility, compact size, and ability to integrate multiple sensors, they are mostly sought for applications that require supplementing human effort in risky and monotonous missions. Despite all of these advantages, rotorcrafts, in general, are limited by their endurance and power-intensive flight requirements, which consequently affect the time of flight and operational range. On the other hand, fixed-wing aircrafts have an extended range, as the entire thrust force is along the direction of motion and are inherently more stable but are limited by their takeoff and landing strip requirements. One of the potential solutions to increase the endurance of VTOL rotorcrafts (Vertical Take-Off and Landing Vehicles) was to exploit the thrust vectoring ability of the individual actuators in multi-rotors, which would enable take-off and hovering as a VTOL vehicle and flight as a fixed-wing aircraft. The primary aim of this paper is to lay out the overall design process of a Hybrid VTOL tilt-rotor UAV from the initial conceptual sketch to the final fabricated prototype. The novelty of the design lies in achieving thrust vectoring capabilities in a fixed-wing platform with minimum actuation and no additional control complexity. This paper presents novel bi-copter that has been designed to perform as a hybrid configuration in both VTOL and fixed wing conditions with minimum actuators in comparison to existing designs. The unified dynamic modelling along with the approximation of multiple aerodynamic coefficients by numerical simulations is also presented. The overall conceptual design, dynamic modeling, computational simulation, and experimental analysis of the novel hybrid fixed-wing bi-copter with thrust vectoring capabilities aiming to substantially increase the flight range and endurance compared to the conventional aircraft rotorcraft configurations are presented.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

Panigrahi

Krishna

Thondiyath

2021

Sensors

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“…The Multi-TRUAVs have a simplified mechanical structure and more symmetrical aircraft layout in the longitudinal direction. However, due to the increase of the rotors and the existence of multiple flight modes, there are still some problems that need to be solved in the design and flight control of Multi-TRUAVs, thus it has attracted the attention of many researchers [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Ozdemir designs a flying-wing UAV named TURAC which has two rotors and one main coaxial fan [8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Chen developed a quad tilt-rotor UAV; only the two front rotors can tilt. The model of the vehicle is constructed based on experiments and numerical analysis, and a control scheme composed of robust servo linear quadratic regulator and extended state observer is designed [12]. Carlson and Chowdhury developed a unique tilt-rotor UAV which was controlled by a proportional integral differential (PID) controller; the simulation and flight test were also carried out [13,14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Nonlinear Robust Sliding Mode Controller with Auxiliary Dynamic System for the Hovering Flight of a Tilt Tri-Rotor UAV

Huang

et al. 2020

Applied Sciences

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The tilt tri-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has three flight modes: the hover mode, the transition mode, and the fixed-wing mode. Controller design in the hover mode is the premise of realizing stable flight of this kind of UAV. Due to the particular structure with odd rotors and strong nonlinearity, the modeling and control of the tilt tri-rotor UAV remain an active and ongoing research topic. To overcome these problems and achieve stable flight control, this paper proposes a sliding mode-based nonlinear control scheme for the hovering flight of a tilt tri-rotor UAV, consisting of position control, attitude control, and control allocation. First, the mathematical model of the UAV is given by using the Newton–Euler formulation. Second, a cascade flight controller consisting of the position controller and the attitude controller is developed based on sliding mode control (SMC). For the position controller, an auxiliary dynamic system composed of the hyperbolic tangent functions is introduced to the SMC approach for constraining the output magnitude of the thrust and the reference attitudes. Besides, a disturbance observer is applied to the attitude controller to alleviate the chattering and improve robustness. Furthermore, according to the structural characteristics of the tilt tri-rotor UAV, a control allocation algorithm is developed to map the virtual control quantities calculated by the cascade flight controller to the actual actuators. Simulations are conducted to verify the robustness against the external disturbances and parameter variations, and the performance comparisons with two other control schemes are also given. Finally, the experiment is also carried out to validate the performance of the proposed control scheme.

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“…Regarding the nonlinear control problem of Tilt-rotor electrical vertical take-off and landing, [13] discussed a hovering state attitude control law based on nonlinear dynamic inversion, and successfully implemented and evaluated the proposed method in a proof of concept simulation. To deal with the actuator saturation and uncertain disturbance problems of a novel Tilt-rotor UAV, [14] proposed an improved control method based on the combination of the robust servo linear quadratic regulator optimal control and the extended state observer. Flight simulations were carried out to verify the effectiveness of the designed flight control law.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wind Field Disturbance Analysis and Flight Control System Design for a Novel Tilt-Rotor UAV

Zhang

Wang

et al. 2020

IEEE Access

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The wind field has a great influence on the control stability of Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), especially during the takeoff and landing phase. The airspeed of UAV is so small during these phases that it cannot generate stable aerodynamic forces, which will significantly reduce the wind robustness of Tilt-rotor UAV. In this paper, the disturbance of wind field is analyzed from two perspectives: the wind field acting on the UAV fuselage, which is regarded as external interference, and the wind acting on the propeller, which is considered as modeling error. After analyzing the interference mechanism of wind field, a generalized extended state observer (GESO) and a H robust control method with mixed sensitivity are proposed, which could empower the Tilt-rotor UAV with good interference suppression ability as well as better performance tracking ability. Finally, the laboratory simulation and flight experiment are studied. The results validate the theory and prove that the proposed method could resist the interference of wind field and shows excellent control effect. INDEX TERMS Tilt-rotor, unmanned aerial vehicle, wind field disturbance, generalized extended state observer, robust control.

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Design of Flight Control System for a Novel Tilt-Rotor UAV

Cited by 27 publications

References 22 publications

Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

Design, Analysis, and Testing of a Hybrid VTOL Tilt-Rotor UAV for Increased Endurance

A Nonlinear Robust Sliding Mode Controller with Auxiliary Dynamic System for the Hovering Flight of a Tilt Tri-Rotor UAV

Wind Field Disturbance Analysis and Flight Control System Design for a Novel Tilt-Rotor UAV

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