Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) control has attracted increasing research attention for it retains the high-performance of NDI and has enhanced robustness. However, when actual elements of the flight control system and real-world phenomena (such as actuator dynamics, sensor noise, time delay, etc.) are considered, the INDI control may have degraded performance or even lose stability. This paper analyzed the stability and performance of an incremental controller for a SISO linear plant based on transfer functions. Besides, the theoretical analysis results are verified through numerical evaluations for the incremental controller of the short-period aircraft model using comprehensive metrics.
In this paper, the incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) method is applied to the control system design of coaxial rotor UAVs. The aerodynamic uncertainty and anti-disturbance problems are solved in the control system design. The designed controller gives the UAV excellent flight performance and control robustness. An incremental gain method (IGM) is proposed for the delay problem of the state derivative. This method has the advantages of less calculation load and simple parameter adjustment, which provides excellent convenience for applying INDI controllers to coaxial rotor UAVs. The…
This paper proposes a novel control law for accurate tracking of agile trajectories using a tailsitter flying wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that transitions between vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and forward flight. The global control formulation enables maneuvering throughout the flight envelope, including uncoordinated flight with sideslip. Differential flatness of the nonlinear tailsitter dynamics with a simplified aerodynamics model is shown. Using the flatness transform, the proposed controller incorporates tracking of the position reference along with its derivatives velocity,…
Unlike fixed-gain robust control, which trades off performance with modeling uncertainty, direct adaptive control uses partial modeling information for online tuning. The present paper combines retrospective cost adaptive control (RCAC), a direct adaptive control technique for sampled-data systems, with online system identification based on recursive least squares (RLS) with variable-rate forgetting (VRF). The combination of RCAC and RLS-VRF constitutes data-driven RCAC (DDRCAC), where the online system identification is used to construct the target model, which defines the retrospective perfo…
In order to further expand the flight envelope of quadrotors under actuator failures, we design a nonlinear sensor-based fault-tolerant controller to stabilize a quadrotor with failure of two opposing rotors in the high-speed flight condition (> 8m/s). The incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) approach which excels in handling model uncertainties is adopted to compensate for the significant unknown aerodynamic effects. The internal dynamics of such an underactuated system have been analyzed, and subsequently stabilized by re-defining the control output. The proposed method can be gene…
Dynamic Inversion: An Incrementally Evolving Methodology for Flight Control Design
Institute of Flight Systems, German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心飞行系统研究所）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；Institute of Aeroelasticity, German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心空气弹性研究所）
This paper proposes a nonlinear control architecture for flexible aircraft simultaneous trajectory tracking and load alleviation. By exploiting the control redundancy, the gust and maneuver loads are alleviated without degrading the rigid-body command tracking performance. The proposed control architecture contains four cascaded control loops: position control, flight path control, attitude control, and optimal multi-objective wing control. Since the position kinematics are not influenced by model uncertainties, the nonlinear dynamic inversion control is applied. On the contrary, the flight pa…
