Disturbance observer based sliding mode control for unmanned helicopter hovering operations in presence of external disturbances

Numerous control techniques are developed for miniature unmanned helicopters to do hover operation with each method having its own advantages and limitations. During the hover operation helicopters suffer from unknown external disturbances such as wind and ground effect. For a stable operation, these disturbances must be compensated accurately. This paper presents a disturbance observer based sliding mode control technique for small-scale unmanned helicopters to do hover operation in presence of external disturbances. To counteract both matched and mismatched uncertainties a new sliding surface is designed based on the disturbances estimations. The controller design is based on the linearized state-space model of the helicopter which effectively describes helicopter dynamics during the hover operations. The model mismatch and external disturbances are estimated as lumped disturbances and are compensated in the controller design. The proposed controller reduces chattering and is capable of handling matched and mismatched uncertainties. The control performance is successfully tested in Simulink

Constrained anti-disturbance control for a quadrotor based on differential flatness

The classical control design based on linearised model is widely used in practice even to those inherently nonlinear systems. Although linear design techniques are relatively mature and enjoy the simple structure in implementations, they can be prone to misbehaviour and failure when the system state is far away from the operating point. To avoid the drawbacks and exploit the advantages of linear design methods while tackling the system nonlinearity, a hybrid control structure is developed in this paper. First, the model predictive control is used to impose states and inputs constraints on the linearised model, which makes the linearisation satisfy the small-perturbation requirement and reduces the bound of linearisation error. On the other hand, a combination of disturbance observer based control and H1 control, called composite hierarchical anti-disturbance control, is constructed for the linear model to provide robustness against multiple disturbances. The constrained reference states and inputs generated by the outer-loop model predictive controller are asymptotically tracked by the inner-loop composite anti-disturbance controller. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework, a case study on quadrotor is conducted

Backpropagating constraints-based trajectory tracking control of a quadrotor with constrained actuator dynamics and complex unknowns

In this paper, a backpropagating constraints-based trajectory tracking control (BCTTC) scheme is addressed for trajectory tracking of a quadrotor with complex unknowns and cascade constraints arising from constrained actuator dynamics, including saturations and dead zones. The entire quadrotor system including actuator dynamics is decomposed into five cascade subsystems connected by intermediate saturated nonlinearities. By virtue of the cascade structure, backpropagating constraints (BCs) on intermediate signals are derived from constrained actuator dynamics suffering from nonreversible rotations and nonnegative squares of rotors, and decouple subsystems with saturated connections. Combining with sliding-mode errors, BC-based virtual controls are individually designed by addressing underactuation and cascade constraints. In order to remove smoothness requirements on intermediate controls, first-order filters are employed, and thereby contributing to backstepping-like subcontrollers synthesizing in a recursive manner. Moreover, universal adaptive compensators are exclusively devised to dominate intermediate tracking residuals and complex unknowns. Eventually, the closed-loop BCTTC system stability can be ensured by the Lyapunov synthesis, and trajectory tracking errors can be made arbitrarily small. Simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed BCTTC scheme for a quadrotor with complex constrains and unknowns

Robust hovering and trajectory tracking control of a quadrotor helicopter using acceleration feedback and a novel disturbance observer

Hovering and trajectory tracking control of rotary-wing aircrafts in the presence of uncertainties and external disturbances is a very challenging task. This thesis focuses on the development of the robust hovering and trajectory tracking control algorithms for a quadrotor helicopter subject to both periodic and aperiodic disturbances along with noise and parametric uncertainties. A hierarchical control structure is employed where high-level position controllers produce reference attitude angles for the low-level attitude controllers. Reference attitude angles are usually determined analytically from the position command signals that control the positional dynamics. However, such analytical formulas may produce large and non-smooth reference angles which must be saturated and low-pass filtered. In this thesis, desired attitude angles are determined numerically using constrained nonlinear optimization where certain magnitude and rate constraints are imposed. Furthermore, an acceleration based disturbance observer (AbDOB) is designed to estimate and suppress disturbances acting on the positional dynamics of the quadrotor. For the attitude control, a nested position, velocity, and inner acceleration feedback control structure consisting of PID and PI type controllers are developed to provide high sti ness against external disturbances. Reliable angular acceleration is estimated through an extended Kalman filter (EKF) cascaded with a classical Kalman lter (KF). This thesis also proposes a novel disturbance observer which consists of a bank of band-pass filters connected parallel to the low-pass filter of a classical disturbance observer. Band-pass filters are centered at integer multiples of the fundamental frequency of the periodic disturbance. Number and bandwidth of the band-pass filters are two crucial parameters to be tuned in the implementation of the new structure. Proposed disturbance observer is integrated with a sliding mode controller to tackle the robust hovering and trajectory tracking control problem. The sensitivity of the proposed disturbance observer based control system to the number and bandwidth of the band-pass filters are thoroughly investigated via several simulations. Simulations are carried out on a high delity model where sensor biases and measurement noise are also considered. Results show that the proposed controllers are very effective in providing robust hovering and trajectory tracking performance when the quadrotor helicopter is subject to the wind gusts generated by the Dryden wind model along with plant uncertainties and measurement noise. A comparison with the classical disturbance observer-based control is also provided where better tracking performance with improved robustness is achieved in the presence of noise and external disturbance

Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

With the increasing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian applications, critical safety issues need to be specially considered in order to make better and wider use of them. UAVs are usually employed to work in hazardous and complex environments, which may seriously threaten the safety and reliability of UAVs. Therefore, the safety and reliability of UAVs are becoming imperative for development of advanced intelligent control systems. The key challenge now is the lack of fully autonomous and reliable control techniques in face of different operation conditions and sophisticated environments. Further development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems is required to be reliable in the presence of system component faults and to be insensitive to model uncertainties and external environmental disturbances. This thesis research aims to design and develop novel control schemes for UAVs with consideration of all the factors that may threaten their safety and reliability. A novel adaptive sliding mode control (SMC) strategy is proposed to accommodate model uncertainties and actuator faults for an unmanned quadrotor helicopter. Compared with the existing adaptive SMC strategies in the literature, the proposed adaptive scheme can tolerate larger actuator faults without stimulating control chattering due to the use of adaptation parameters in both continuous and discontinuous control parts. Furthermore, a fuzzy logic-based boundary layer and a nonlinear disturbance observer are synthesized to further improve the capability of the designed control scheme for tolerating model uncertainties, actuator faults, and unknown external disturbances while preventing overestimation of the adaptive control parameters and suppressing the control chattering effect. Then, a cost-effective fault estimation scheme with a parallel bank of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is proposed to accurately estimate actuator fault magnitude and an active fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework is established for a closed-loop quadrotor helicopter system. Finally, a reconfigurable control allocation approach is combined with adaptive SMC to achieve the capability of tolerating complete actuator failures with application to a modified octorotor helicopter. The significance of this proposed control scheme is that the stability of the closed-loop system is theoretically guaranteed in the presence of both single and simultaneous actuator faults

Controller design for vehicle heading control

Unmanned ground vehicles have significant role to play in the fields of military, space exploration, accessing dangerous terrain, operating in hazardous industries and process stations. Control of the heading of the vehicle is critical to its safety and stability. Modelling the parameters and process is critical to developing a control strategy for it. There are multiple factors that are responsible for the heading of the vehicle which can lead to a complicated process model. However, the model has been simplified by suitable approximations. The objective of this research is to control the heading of a vehicle in the real world environment under the unpredictable and unstructured surroundings. The change of heading direction and the speed of the vehicle influence to the motion of a vehicle. The vehicle model that was assumed was a four wheeled electric motor driven car, whose steering system is modified to be controlled by a DC servo motor mounted at the steering wheel shaft, and is fitted with a compass sensor to measure the current heading direction of the vehicle. Various control strategies were simulated in Simulink to converge at the most appropriate one. The chief objective was to achieve minimum settling time and also reduce overshoot and steady state error. Strategies such as double loop controller, Internal Model Controller (IMC), Modified IMC and robust controller are used for the same process and the performance of each is presented

Design and application of advanced disturbance rejection control for small fixed-wing UAVs

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen continual growth in both research and commercial applications. Attractive features such as their small size, light weight and low cost are a strong driver of this growth. However, these factors also bring about some drawbacks. The light weight and small size means that small UAVs are far more susceptible to performance degradation from factors such as wind gusts. Due to the generally low cost, available sensors are somewhat limited in both quality and available measurements. For example, it is very unlikely that angle of attack is sensed by a small UAV. These aircraft are usually constructed by the end user, so a tangible amount of variation will exist between different aircraft of the same type. Depending on application, additional variation between flights from factors such as battery placement or additional sensors may exist. This makes the application of optimal model based control methods difficult. Research literature on the topic of small UAV control is very rich in regard to high level control, such as path planning in wind. A common assumption in such literature is the existence of a low level control method which is able to track demanded aircraft attitudes to complete a task. Design of such controllers in the presence of significant wind or modelling errors (factors collectively addressed as lumped disturbances herein) is rarely considered. Disturbance Observer Based Control (DOBC) is a means of improving the robustness of a baseline feedback control scheme in the presence of lumped disturbances. The method allows for the rejection of the influence of unmeasurable disturbances much more quickly than traditional integral control, while also enabling recovery of nominal feedback con- trol performance. The separation principle of DOBC allows for the design of a nominal feedback controller, which does not need to be robust against disturbances. A DOBC augmentation can then be applied to ensure this nominal performance is maintained even in the presence of disturbances. This method offers highly attractive properties for control design, and has seen a large rise in popularity in recent years. Current literature on this subject is very often conducted purely in simulation. Ad- ditionally, very advanced versions of DOBC control are now being researched. To make the method attractive to small UAV operators, it would be beneficial if a simple DOBC design could be used to realise the benefits of this method, as it would be more accessible and applicable by many. This thesis investigates the application of a linear state space disturbance observer to low level flight control of a small UAV, along with developments of the method needed to achieve good performance in flight testing. Had this work been conducted purely in simulation, it is likely many of the difficulties encountered would not have been addressed or discovered. This thesis presents four main contributions. An anti-windup method has been devel- oped which is able to alleviate the effect of control saturation on the disturbance observer dynamics. An observer is designed which explicitly considers actuator dynamics. This development was shown to enable faster observer estimation dynamics, yielding better disturbance rejection performance. During initial flight testing, a significant aeroelastic oscillation mode was discovered. This issue was studied in detail theoretically, with a pro- posed solution developed and applied. The solution was able to fully alleviate the effect in flight. Finally, design and development of an over-actuated DOBC method is presented. A method for design of DOBC for over actuated systems was developed and studied. The majority of results in this thesis are demonstrated with flight test data

Modelling, identification, and control of a quadrotor helicopter

In this dissertation, we focused on the study of an autonomous flight control of quadrotor helicopter. Robust nonlinear control design strategies using observer-based control are developed, which are capable of achieving reliable and accurate tracking control for quadrotor UAV containing dynamic uncertainties, external disturbances. In order to ease readability of this dissertation, detailed explanations of the mathematical model of quadrotor UAV is provided, including the Newton-Euler formalism, Lyapunov-based stability analysis methods, sliding mode control (SMC) and backstepping fundamentals, and observer-based nonlinear control tools. The tracking control problem of a quadrotor in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances is investigated. Particularly, this dissertation presents the design and experimental implementation of nonlinear controller of quadrotor with observer to estimate the uncertainties and external disturbances to meet the desired control objectives. Based on a nonlinear model which considers basic aerodynamic forces and external disturbances, the quadrotor UAV model is simulated to perform a variety of maneuvering such as take-off, landing, smooth translation and horizontal and circular trajectory motions. Backstepping and sliding mode techniques combined with observers are studied, tested and compared. Simulation and a real platform were developed to prove the ability of the observer-based controller to successfully perform certain missions in the presence of unknown external disturbances and can obtain good and satisfactory estimation

Stability Analysis of a Helicopter with an External Slung Load System

This paper describes the stability analysis of a helicopter with an underslung external load system. The Lyapunov second method is considered for the stability analysis. The system is considered as a cascade connection of uncertain nonlinear system. The stability analysis is conducted to ensure the stabilisation of the helicopter system and the positioning of the underslung load at hover condition. Stability analysis and numerical results proved that if desired condition for the stability is met, then it is possible to locate the load at the specified position or its neighbourhood