Robust Adaptive Control with Reduced Conservatism for a Convertible UAV

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This work proposes a robust adaptive mixing controller to achieve trajectory tracking throughout the full-flight envelope, with ensured stability, of a quad-tiltorotor convertible plane (CP) vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), here called QuadCP-VTOL UAV. Accordingly, a nonlinear multi-body dynamic model is obtained using the Euler-Lagrange formalism, from which a linear parameter-varying (LPV) model is derived to describe the dynamics of the QuadCP-VTOL UAV within its flight envelope. The set containing the UAV's flight envelope is partitioned into subsets and, for each subset, a less conservative formulation of the linear robust mixed H2/H∞ candidate controller is proposed. An adaptive mixing scheme is employed to perform a convex combination of the candidate controllers within the subsets intersection. Results of Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) experiments are presented to corroborate the efficacy of the proposed control strategy.