Full-Envelope Flight Control for Compound Vertical Takeoff and Landing Aircraft

TL;DR

This paper develops a unified nonlinear geometric control system for compound VTOL aircraft that operates seamlessly across all flight phases, including transition, validated through simulations and real flight tests.

Contribution

It extends existing control laws to cover compound VTOLs with a transition strategy, avoiding switching control algorithms across flight modes.

Findings

Control laws are effective across the entire flight envelope.

Successful implementation on a Pixhawk controller.

Validated through hardware-in-the-loop and flight experiments.

Abstract

This paper presents a flight control design for compound Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) vehicles. With their multitude of degrees of controllability as well as the significant variations in their flight characteristics, VTOL vehicles present challenges when it comes to designing their flight control system, especially for the transition phase where the vehicle transitions between near-hovering and high-speed wing-borne flights. This work extends previous research on the design of unified and generic control laws that can be applied to a broad class of vehicles such as hovering vehicles and fixed-wing aircraft. This paper exploits this unifying property and presents an extension for the case of compound VTOL vehicles. The proposed control approach consists of nonlinear geometric control laws that are continuously applicable over the entire flight envelope, excluding the use of switching policies between different control algorithms. A transition strategy consisting of a sequence of high-level setpoints is associated with the flight control laws, it is defined with respect to flight envelope limitations and is applied in this work to a commercially available compound unmanned aerial vehicle. The control algorithms are implemented on a Pixhawk controller, they are evaluated via Hardware-In-the-Loop simulations and finally validated in a flight experiment.