Modeling and Adaptive Control Law Design for a Bi-Tiltrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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VIEW CORRECTIONPublication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34, Issue 6
Abstract
This paper presents modeling and control law design for a bi-tiltrotor unmanned aerial vehicle for autonomous payload delivery. An ultralight bi-tiltrotor aerial vehicle was developed for a payload delivery contest using only two motors attached to a carbon fiber tube with an additional cube basket to carry the payload. To achieve desirable three-dimensional (3D) trajectory tracking performance with unknown payload, an adaptive control system has been developed, which consists of two components: (1) a baseline control law, including a lateral speed controller, forward speed controller, yaw angle controller, and altitude controller; and (2) an adaptive augmentation to all these four channels to compensate for modeling uncertainties and disturbances caused by the payload, which has large influence on system dynamics due to the light weight of the vehicle. A mathematical model of the vehicle has been built using the Newton-Euler method and simplified based on reasonable assumptions to facilitate control design. The baseline control law employs conventional proportional-derivative control structure. Subsequently, adaptive control theory is adopted in the adaptive augmentation design. Simulation examples verify the efficacy of the proposed adaptive control solution.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository or online in accordance with funder data retention policies. (Donglei Sun, Chao Ma, and Naira Hovakimyan, Simulation model of a bi-tiltrotor UAV with adaptive control augmentations, URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/106967).
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the Aeronautical Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2017ZA67001), the China Scholarship Council, the NSF NRI awards (Award Nos. 1830639 and 1528036), and the ZJU-UIUC Institute Research Program. The authors would like to acknowledge the help from Xinchao Wei for conducting the thrust and torque test of the rotor.
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 34 • Issue 6 • November 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 13, 2019
Accepted: Jul 6, 2021
Published online: Aug 14, 2021
Published in print: Nov 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Jan 14, 2022
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