Coupling Dynamics and Three-Dimensional Trajectory Optimization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Propelled by Electroaerodynamic Thrusters

Abstract

Electroaerodynamic unmanned aerial vehicles (EAD-UAVs) are innovative UAVs that use high-voltage asymmetric electrodes to ionize air molecules and Coulomb force to push these ions to produce thrust. Unlike fixed-wing and rotor UAVs, EAD-UAVs contain no moving surfaces and have the advantages of very low noise, low mechanical fatigue, and no carbon emissions. This paper proposes an EAD-UAV configuration with an orthogonal arrangement of multiple EAD thrusters to adjust the EAD-UAV attitude and flight trajectory through voltage distribution control alone. Based on a one-dimensional dynamic model of an EAD thruster, the attitude–path coupling dynamics of the EAD-UAV were derived. To achieve EAD-UAV flight control for a specified target, the Bezier shaping approach (BSA) was implemented to realize rapid trajectory optimization considering the coupling dynamic constraints. The numerical simulation results indicate that the BSA can quickly procure an optimized flight trajectory that satisfies the dynamic and boundary constraints. Compared with the Gaussian pseudospectral method (GPM), the BSA changes the optimization index of the objective function by nearly 1.14% but demands only nearly 1.95% of the computational time on average. Hence, the improved integrative Bezier shaping approach (IBSA) can overcome the poor convergence issue of the BSA under the continuous acceleration constraint of multi-target flight trajectories.