Nonlinear Flight Control applied to a Tandem Tilt-Wing eVTOL aircraft

Kurzfassung

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has the potential to address the growing demand for mobility in an economically and ecologically sustainable manner through the use of electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles (eVTOLs). One promising configuration for these types of aircraft is a tilt-wing configuration, but it has an associated high level of complexity. This problem is particularly challenging from the perspective of flight control laws. Thus, the present work aims to design a flight controller for an electric tandem tilt-wing aircraft for the hover and landing phase capable of withstanding wind gusts. In order to do so, an INDI controller which uses a low-fidelity model of the system dynamics was implemented. Due to the overactuated nature of the system, a control allocation algorithm was implemented, named INCA with Kernel Restoring. An outer-loop, which made use of PCH, was then designed according to the mission requirements of the hover and landing maneuvers. From the analysis of the controller performance, it was observed that the minimum requirements were met and that the performance of the aircraft under wind gusts was decent. Nevertheless, it was concluded that the performance of the controller could be greatly improved from improvements of the implemented low-fidelity model and by adjusting the controller gains from an automatic optimization script.