Abstract
The tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (TRUAV) has vertical take-off and landing and high-speed flight capabilities through conversion and reconversion modes, thereby presenting wide application prospects. This article presents a compact tilt tri-rotor UAV. For flying in the conversion mode, the TRUAV needs to realize the transition of two control logic and two kinds of actuators in both of the rotor and fixed-wing modes, achieving the control of the multi-input multioutput, input nonaffine, and nonlinear multichannel cross-coupling UAV system. Furthermore, the lateral dynamics of a tilt tri-rotor UAV is more unstable for unpaired rotors. These system characteristics present a great challenge to conversion control. To solve these problems, the nonlinear dynamic model of the vehicle in the conversion mode is provided. Furthermore, a cascade control system consisting of position control, velocity control, angle control, angular velocity control, and control mixer is proposed. The simulation result of the control system shows steady flight and a fast transition in the conversion mode with modeling uncertainty in case of no wind.
Highlights
The tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (TRUAV) has a rotor mode, fixed-wing mode, conversion mode, and reconversion mode
The reconversion mode is from the fixed-wing mode to the rotor mode
The TRUAV realizes vertical take-off and landing by the lift generated by rotors or propellers; in the fixed-wing mode, the TRUAV achieves the high-speed cruise by the lift generated by wings; the conversion mode realizes the transition between the rotor mode and fixedwing mode through tilting of rotors or propellers
Summary
The tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (TRUAV) has a rotor mode, fixed-wing mode, conversion mode, and reconversion mode. Cetinsoy et al.[7] adopted cascade control, the outer loop controlled positions producing command angles and thrust, and the inner loop controlled attitude Both loops used dynamic inversion for a small-tilt wing UAV with fourrotor configuration, and the simulation results and actual flight experiments realized a stable flight in the conversion mode, of which the duration was 10 s. The control system keeps the lateral position of the tilt tri-rotor UAV and realizes a fast and stable flight in the conversion mode with modeling uncertainty. Aiming at the character of the flight in the conversion mode, different controllers in low- and high-speed segments, respectively, are designed for the position control, velocity control, and angle control. The controller adopts sliding mode control and the design process is the same as u1, which could be designed as
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