Conversion Flight Control for Tilt Rotor Aircraft Using Nonlinear Time-Varying Perspective
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 33, Issue 5
Abstract
Unlike the popularly used approaches (in which the time-varying nature of the system’s dynamics is neglected), a Lyapunov-based nonlinear time-varying framework is provided to handle the longitudinal control of tilt rotor aircraft during conversion flight. The conversion flight control problem is regarded as the trajectory-tracking problem with respect to a desired generalized conversion corridor. Introducing the concept of a virtual plane, the design procedure is boiled down into two steps: the design of the virtual controller and the distribution of the actual control inputs. Firstly, aimed at the nonlinear time-varying control-oriented model, a virtual controller that renders the globally uniformly exponential stability of the origin, together with a constraint to alleviate the input saturation, is given with rigorous theoretical proof using the sum-of-squares (SOS) technique. Next, a practical control allocation strategy is adopted to achieve the deflections of the actual control surfaces. To enhance the robustness of the controller, a nonlinear disturbance observer is proposed to estimate the influence of the uncertainties of the aerodynamic parameters and modeling errors.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 61673325 and U1713223) and the Science and Research Project of Fujian Province, China (Nos. JAT190655 and JAT170426).
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 33 • Issue 5 • September 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 18, 2017
Accepted: Apr 30, 2020
Published online: Jul 10, 2020
Published in print: Sep 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Dec 10, 2020
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