UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

On the Actuator Dynamics of Dynamic Control Allocation for a Small Fixed-Wing UAV With Direct Lift Control

Yan, Yunda; Yang, Jun; Liu, Cunjia; Coombes, Matthew; Li, Shihua; Chen, Wen-Hua; (2020) On the Actuator Dynamics of Dynamic Control Allocation for a Small Fixed-Wing UAV With Direct Lift Control. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology , 28 (3) pp. 984-991. 10.1109/TCST.2019.2945909. Green open access

[thumbnail of Yan_Final_extracted.pdf]
Preview
Text
Yan_Final_extracted.pdf

Download (7MB) | Preview

Abstract

A novel dynamic control allocation method is proposed for a small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), whose flaps can be actuated as fast as other control surfaces, offering an extra way of changing the lift directly. The actuator dynamics of this kind of UAVs, which may be sluggish comparing with the UAV dynamics, should also be considered in the control design. To this end, a hierarchical control allocation architecture is developed. A disturbance observer-based high-level tracking controller is first designed to accommodate the lagging effect of the actuators and to compensate the adverse effect of external disturbances. Then, a dynamic control allocator based on a receding-horizon performance index is developed, which forces the actuator state in the low level to follow the optimized reference. Compared with the conventional control allocation method that assumes ideal actuators with infinite bandwidths, higher tracking accuracy of the UAV and better energy efficiency can be achieved by the proposed method. Stability analysis and high-fidelity simulations both demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which can be deployed on different fixed-wing UAVs with flaps to achieve better performance.

Type: Article
Title: On the Actuator Dynamics of Dynamic Control Allocation for a Small Fixed-Wing UAV With Direct Lift Control
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2019.2945909
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/TCST.2019.2945909
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Control allocation, actuator dynamics, disturbance observer, flight control, nonminimum phase
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10188637
Downloads since deposit
42Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item