Adaptive Control of Variable-Pitch Propellers: Pursuing Minimum-Effort Operation

Abstract

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more commonly used in industry, their performance will continue to be challenged. A performance bottleneck that is crucial to overcome is the design of electric propulsion systems for UAVs that operate in disparate flight modes (e.g., hovering and forward-moving flight). While flight mode dissimilarity presents a fundamental design challenge for fixed-geometry propulsion systems, variable-geometry systems such as the Variable Pitch Propeller (VPP) ones are able to provide superior propulsion performance across a wide range of flight modes. This work builds on previous work by the authors and presents a VPP system control and estimation framework for safe, near-minimum-electrical-effort propulsion system behavior across the whole operation state space of any UAV. Multiple simulated validations are presented to support the feasibility of the approach.