Abstract
This article proposes a composite path following controller that allows the small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle to follow a predefined path. Assuming that the vehicle is equipped with an autopilot for altitude and airspeed maintained well, the controller design adopts the hierarchical control structure. With the inner-loop controller design based on the notion of active disturbance rejection control which will respond to the desired roll angle command, the core part of the outer-loop controller is designed based on Lyapunov stability theorem to generate the desired course rate for the straight-line paths. The bank to turn maneuver is used to transform the desired course rate to the desired roll angle command. Both the hardware-in-the-loop simulation in the X-Plane simulator and actual experimental flight tests have been successfully achieved, which verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been wildly developed in diverse military and civilian application domains in the last decade
Just as all of the 2-D curve can be approximated by a series of segments, we focus on the UAVs’ line following below.[23]
The active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) method was applied for the attitude control
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been wildly developed in diverse military and civilian application domains in the last decade. The small fixed-wing UAVs have been applied in the polar environment observation,[1,2] monitoring moving objects,[3] testing the new control strategies,[4,5] and many other domains. In terms of advanced control technologies, path planning,[2,3,6] cooperative control,[6,7] and obstacle avoidance[8] have been designed, tested, and applied in fixedwing UAVs in recent years. It can be seem that it is critical for the vehicles to track or follow the predefined path or trajectory accurately so that they can realize these technologies. The approaches to realize the path following or trajectory tracking control of a small UAV appear on the linear and nonlinear control methods.
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