Adaptive Attitude Control for a Tail-Sitter UAV with Single Thrust-Vectored Propeller
Wufan Wang, Jihong Zhu, Minchi Kuang, Xufei Zhu
Abstract
Tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained extensive popularity in recent years due to their inherent advantages of both fixed wing and rotary wing UAVs. However, these advantages are accompanied with control challenges because of two different flight regimes and drastically changing dynamics during transition flights. This paper focuses on the design of a unified controller free from cumbersome controller switchings and applicable in all attitude range for a tail-sitter with single thrust-vectored propeller. To achieve this, both thrust vectoring model and full-regime aerodynamics model are built first, after which a complete attitude dynamics model of the tail-sitter is established utilizing the quaternion attitude description to avoid the singularity problem. An adaptive controller is then derived based on a simplified model using the Lyapunov stability theory with unknown system parameters identified online by forgetting factor recursive least square (FF-RLS) method. Flight experiments are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2018_adaptiveattitude,
title = {Adaptive Attitude Control for a Tail-Sitter UAV with Single Thrust-Vectored Propeller},
author = {Wufan Wang and Jihong Zhu and Minchi Kuang and Xufei Zhu},
booktitle = {ICRA 2018},
year = {2018}
}