Loughborough University
Browse
Final.pdf (7.53 MB)

On the actuator dynamics of dynamic control allocation for a small fixed-wing UAV with direct lift control

Download (7.53 MB)
journal contribution
posted on 2019-10-03, 08:12 authored by Yunda Yan, Jun Yang, Cunjia LiuCunjia Liu, Matthew CoombesMatthew Coombes, Shihua Li, Wen-Hua ChenWen-Hua Chen
A novel dynamic control allocation method is proposed for a small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), whose flaps can be actuated as fast as other control surfaces, offering an extra way of changing the lift directly. The actuator dynamics of this kind of UAVs, which may be sluggish comparing to the UAV dynamics, should also be considered in the control design. To this end, a hierarchical control allocation architecture is developed. A disturbance observer based high-level tracking controller is first designed to accommodate the lagging effect of
the actuators and to compensate the adverse effect of external disturbances. Then, a dynamic control allocator based on a receding-horizon performance index is developed, which forces the actuator state in the low-level to follow the optimised reference. Compared to the conventional control allocation method that assumes ideal actuators with infinite bandwidths, higher tracking accuracy of the UAV and better energy efficiency can be achieved by the proposed method. Stability analysis and high fidelity simulations both demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can be deployed on different fixed-wing UAVs with flaps to achieve better performance.

Funding

UK EPSRC Grant EP/P012868/1

National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61973080, 61973081 and 61750110525

State Scholarship Fund under Grant No. 201706090111

History

School

  • Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering

Department

  • Aeronautical and Automotive Engineering

Published in

IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology

Volume

28

Issue

3

Pages

984 - 991

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© IEEE

Publisher statement

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.

Acceptance date

2019-09-30

Publication date

2020-03-24

Copyright date

2019

ISSN

1063-6536

eISSN

1558-0865

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Cunjia Liu

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC