Integrated Flight and Propulsion Control for Fixed-Wing UAVs via Thrust and Disturbance Compensation

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated control scheme for fixed-wing UAVs with turbojet engines, using hierarchical control and disturbance compensation to ensure accurate position tracking despite unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hierarchical control framework with an extended observer for turbojet-equipped UAVs, enhancing robustness and tracking accuracy.

Findings

The control system guarantees asymptotic convergence to the desired trajectory.

Simulation results demonstrate improved tracking performance.

The approach effectively compensates for unmeasured thrust dynamics and disturbances.

Abstract

This paper investigates the position-tracking control problem for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with a turbojet engine via an integrated flight and propulsion control scheme. To this end, a hierarchical control framework with thrust and disturbance compensation is proposed. In particular, we first propose a perturbed fixed-wing UAV model with turbojet engine dynamics, accounting for both unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances. Second, a versatile extended observer is designed to handle both unmeasurable thrust dynamics and external disturbances. Third, a hierarchical control framework is implemented using three observer-based controllers to guarantee position-tracking performance. With the proposed control strategy, we prove that the closed-loop system asymptotically converges to the desired trajectory. Finally, a comparative simulation is performed to illustrate the proposed control strategy.