A full controller for a fixed-wing UAV
For UAV control engineers, it offers an easily implementable controller that avoids extra sensors or observers, though it is an incremental improvement over existing nonlinear control methods.
The paper presents a nonlinear control law for fixed-wing UAVs that unifies path-following and longitudinal control, ensuring global asymptotic stability and robustness to disturbances, using only states available in commercial autopilots.
This paper presents a nonlinear control law for the stabilization of a fixed-wing UAV. Such controller solves the path-following problem and the longitudinal control problem in a single control. Furthermore, the control design is performed considering aerodynamics and state information available in the commercial autopilots with the aim of an ease implementation. It is achieved that the closed-loop system is G.A.S. and robust to external disturbances. The difference among the available controllers in the literature is: 1) it depends on available states, hence it is not required extra sensors or observers; and 2) it is possible to achieve any desired airplane state with an ease of implementation, since its design is performed keeping in mind the capability of implementation in any commercial autopilot.