Towards a Unified Model-Free Control Architecture for Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicles: Flight Simulation Analysis and Experimental Flights

Hybrid Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) combine the beneficial features of rotorcrafts with fixed-wing configurations providing a complete flight envelope that includes vertical take-off, hovering, transitioning flights, forward flight and vertical landing. Tail sitter MAVs belong to a particular class of hybrid MAVs and its peculiar issue is related to the transitioning flight phase where, for high incidence angles, fast changing of aerodynamic forces and moments are observed which are difficult to model and control accurately. To overcome this issue, we propose a control architecture with model-free control algorithms that is able to stabilize the hybrid MAV’s attitude, velocity, and position without any modeling process. The proposed control architecture consists basically on two steps : 1) The attitude control, in order to ensure the hybrid MAV’s attitude orientation and stability during the entire flight envelope; 2) The guidance system responsible to control both velocity and position. We validate the MFC architecture according to a comprehensive set of flight simulations and real flight experiments. Real flight experiments shown an effective and promising control strategy solving the principal issue of hybrid MAVs that is the formulation of accurate hybrid MAV’s dynamic equations to design control laws. The obtained results provide a straightforward way to validate the methodolog-ical principles presented in this article as well as certify the designed MFC parameters, and establish a conclusion regarding MFC benefits in both theoretical and practical contexts.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  AIAA Scitech 2020 Forum

• Publication date

  2020-01-05

• Fields of study

  Computer Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.2514/6.2020-2075
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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