Integral Backstepping Control Prototyping for a Quad Tilt Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This paper deals with the design and hardware prototyping of Integral Backstepping controllers for a Quad Tilt Wing type of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on a National Instruments myRIO-1900 target and a host PC. The controllers’ parameters for the stabilization and tracking of the attitude and altitude hovering dynamics are tuned in real-time thanks to the proposed Computer Aided Design platform and within a Processor-In-the-Loop co-simulation framework. Such a developed software and hardware methodology is based on the Control Design and Simulation module of LabVIEW environment as well as a set-up Network Streams-based data communication protocol. A nonlinear model of the rotorcraft, which incorporates the dynamics of the vertical flight, is firstly given using the Newton-Euler formalism. Both Integral Backstepping controllers, for the attitude and heading dynamics as well as for the altitude and position states of the drone, are systematically designed and tuned. The proposed Integral Backstepping control strategy is compared to the classical Backstepping and PID control approaches in order to show its robustness superiority under external wind disturbances. Demonstrative software and hardware co-simulations are carried out and compared with each other in order to improve the real-world effectiveness of the proposed robust control approach for the Quad Tilt Wing aircraft navigation.