Robust Control Design for Quad Tilt-Wing UAV

Abstract

This paper describes the design method of a flight control system of a Quad Tilt-Wing (QTW) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). A QTW-UAV is necessary to design a controller considering its nonlinear dynamics because of the appearance of the nonlinearity during transition flight between hovering and level flight. A design method of a flight control system using Dynamic Inversion (DI) that is one of linearization method has been proposed for the UAV. However, the design method based on an accurate model has a possibility of deterioration of control performance and system stability. Therefore, we propose a flight control system that considers uncertainties such as modeling error and disturbances by applying an H-infinity controller to the linearized system. The validity of the proposed control system is verified through numerical simulation and experiment.

Keywords

• Quad Tilt-Wing UAV
• transition flight
• dynamic inversion method
• H-infinity controller
• disturbance accommodating control