Effective design of autopilots for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is still a great challenge, due to unmodeled effects and uncertainties that these vehicles exhibit during flight. Unmodeled effects and uncertainties comprise longitudinal/lateral cross-couplings, as well as poor knowledge of equilibrium points (trimming points) of the UAV dynamics. The main contribution of this article is a new adaptive autopilot design, based on uncertain Euler-Lagrange dynamics of the UAV and where the control can explicitly take into account under-actuation in the dynamics, reduced structural knowledge of cross-couplings and trimming points. This system uncertainty is handled via appropriately designed adaptive laws: stability of the controlled UAV is analyzed. Hardware-in-the-loop tests, comparisons with an Ardupilot autopilot and with a robustified autopilot validate the effectiveness of the control design, even in the presence of strong saturation of the UAV actuators.


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    Title :

    An Underactuated Control System Design for Adaptive Autopilot of Fixed-Wing Drones


    Contributors:
    Baldi, Simone (author) / Roy, Spandan (author) / Yang, Kang (author) / Liu, Di (author)

    Publication date :

    2022-10-05


    Remarks:

    Baldi , S , Roy , S , Yang , K & Liu , D 2022 , ' An Underactuated Control System Design for Adaptive Autopilot of Fixed-Wing Drones ' , IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics , vol. 27 , no. 5 , pp. 4045 - 4056 . https://doi.org/10.1109/TMECH.2022.3144459



    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    629



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