In recent years, because of the emerging requirements for increasing autonomy, the controller of uninhabited air vehicles must be augmented with a very sophisticated autopilot design which is capable of tracking complex and agile maneuvering trajectory. This paper provides a simplified control system framework to solve UAV maneuvering trajectory tracking problem. The flight control system is divided into three subsystems including command generation, transformation and allocation. According to the kinematics equations of the aircraft, flight path angle commands can be generated by desired 3D position from path planning. These commands are transformed to body angular rates through direct nonlinear mapping, which is simpler than common multi-loop method based on time scale separation assumption. Then, by using weighted pseudo-inverse method, the control surface deflections are allocated to follow body angular rates from the previous step. In order to improve the robustness, a nonlinear disturbance observer-based approach is used to compensate the uncertainty of system. A 6DOF nonlinear UAV model is controlled to demonstrate the performance of the trajectory tracking control system. Simulation results show that the control strategy is easy to be realized and the precision of tracking is satisfying.

Date Published: 30 October 2006
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6358, Sixth International Symposium on Instrumentation and Control Technology: Sensors, Automatic Measurement, Control, and Computer Simulation, 63582Q (30 October 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.718010

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6358:
Sixth International Symposium on Instrumentation and Control Technology: Sensors, Automatic Measurement, Control, and Computer Simulation
Jiancheng Fang; Zhongyu Wang, Editor(s)