Adaptive Nonlinear Control of Fixed-Wing VTOL with Airflow Vector Sensing
This work addresses control issues for fixed-wing VTOL aircraft, which is an incremental improvement in a domain-specific area.
The paper tackled the control challenge of fixed-wing VTOL aircraft by developing an adaptive nonlinear tracking controller that uses airflow sensing to estimate forces, resulting in improved velocity tracking and force prediction during flight transitions compared to baseline controllers.
Fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft pose a unique control challenge that stems from complex aerodynamic interactions between wings and rotors. Thus, accurate estimation of external forces is indispensable for achieving high performance flight. In this paper, we present a composite adaptive nonlinear tracking controller for a fixed-wing VTOL. The method employs online adaptation of linear force models, and generates accurate estimation for wing and rotor forces in real-time based on information from a three-dimensional airflow sensor. The controller is implemented on a custom-built fixed-wing VTOL, which shows improved velocity tracking and force prediction during the transition stage from hover to forward flight, compared to baseline flight controllers.