Dual–Authority Thrust–Vectoring of a Tri–TiltRotor employing Model Predictive Control

Abstract

This paper addresses the exploitation of the combined potential of the directly-actuated and the underactuated control authorities of unmanned aerial vehicles with thrust-vectoring actuation. For the modeling, control synthesis and experimental evaluation a custom developed unmanned tri-tiltrotor is employed, equipped with rotor-tilting mechanisms which enable the direct actuation of its longitudinal dynamics, while retaining the standard body-pitching underactuated authority. An explicit model predictive control scheme relying on constrained multiparametric optimization is proposed for the dual-authority optimal control. The backbone of this scheme is a modeling representation that incorporates the separate internal dynamics of the two actuation principles and their interferences as they concurrently act on the free-flying vehicle C. Papachristos ( ) · A. Tzes

Fully autonomous micro air vehicle flight and landing on a moving target using visual–inertial estimation and model‐predictive control

“…Our work on the control synthesis is closely related to previous work of Darivianakis et al (2014) and Papachristos et al (2016) that has been successfully implemented on similar multirotor platforms and Oettershagen et al (2014), (2016) that has been deployed on fixed wing platforms.…”

“…Similarly, Mueller and D’Andrea () presented a nonlinear controller which can stabilize an MAV despite the loss of one, two, or three propellers and demonstrate the significance of using the MAV model in the control synthesis. Regarding linear model‐predictive control, we consider the work of Papachristos, Alexis, and Tzes (), Darivianakis, Alexis, Burri, and Siegwart (), and Oettershagen, Melzer, Leutenegger, Alexis, and Siegwart, () to be the most related one with our control synthesis. They show that a predictive controller can successfully be used for a variety of complex and practical applications (e.g., physical interaction between MAV and the environment) and can easily be implemented in several platforms from quadcopters, tiltrotors to fixed wing aircraft.…”

Full Attitude Control of a VTOL tailsitter UAV

“…The system is designed to use a minimum combination of motors and elevons to control the system within its whole flight envelope. Therefore, the proposed design does not require additional hardware for the transition maneuver, as opposed to other design concepts such as tilt rotors [9]- [12]. This allows maintaining a low cost, low complexity system.…”

Application of an approximate model predictive control scheme on an unmanned aerial vehicle

“…A learning-based MPC controller is proposed in [12]; the quadratic programming solver is running on an onboard computer including an Intel Atom processor. The authors of [13] apply robust MPC to UAVs using a multi-parametric approach; The control law is computed explicitly and evaluated onboard on a computer with an Intel Atom processor.…”