Acceleration-based 3D Flight Control for UAVs: Strategy and Longitudinal Design

Abstract

The design of autopilots for conventional flight of UAVs is a mature field of research. Most of the published design strategies involve linearization about a trim flight condition and the use of basic steady state kinematic relationships to simplify control law design (Blakelock, 1991);(Bryson, 1994). To ensure stability this class of controllers typically imposes significant limitations on the aircraft’s allowable attitude, velocity and altitude deviations. Although acceptable for many applications, these limitations do not allow the full potential of most UAVs to be harnessed. For more demanding UAV applications, it is thus desirable to develop control laws capable of guiding aircraft though the full 3D flight envelope. Such an autopilot will be referred to as a manoeuvre autopilot in this chapter. A number of manoeuvre autopilot design methods exist. Gain scheduling (Leith &. Leithead, 1999) is commonly employed to extend aircraft velocity and altitude flight envelopes (Blakelock, 1991), but does not tend to provide an elegant or effective solution for full 3D manoeuvre control. Dynamic inversion has recently become a popular design strategy for manoeuvre flight control of UAVs and manned aircraft (Bugajski & Enns, 1992); (Lane & Stengel, 1998);(Reiner et al., 1996);(Snell et al., 1992) but suffers from two major drawbacks. The first is controller robustness, a concern explicitly addressed in (Buffington et al., 1993) and (Reiner et al., 1996), and arises due to the open loop nature of the inversion and the inherent uncertainty of aircraft dynamics. The second drawback arises from the slightly Non Minimum Phase (NMP) nature of most aircraft dynamics, which after direct application of dynamic inversion control, results in not only an impractical controller with large counterintuitive control signals (Hauser et al., 1992) (Reiner et al., 1996), but also in undesired internal dynamics whose stability must be investigated explicitly (Slotine & Li, 1991). Although techniques to address the latter drawback have been developed (AlHiddabi & McClamroch, 2002);(Hauser et al., 1992), dynamic inversion is not expected to provide a very practical solution to the 3D flight control problem and should ideally only be used in the presence of relatively certain minimum phase dynamics. Receding Horizon Predictive Control (RHPC) has also been applied to the manoeuvre flight control problem (Bhattacharya et al., 2002);(Miller & Pachter, 1997);(Pachter et al., 1998), and similarly to missile control (Kim et al., 1997). Although this strategy is conceptually very promising the associated computational burden often makes it a practically infeasible solution for UAVs, particularly for lower cost UAVs with limited processing power.