Model Predictive Control of a Convertible Tiltrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

This paper presents a Model Predictive Control (MPC) based control structure for a convertible Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with fixed wings and tiltrotor thrust vectoring. The controller encompasses full flight envelope trajectory tracking, thereby optimally exploiting the aircraft's Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) and cruising-forward flight capabilities. An adaptive control allocation is designed to handle the changing control authorities of the actuators and efficiently distribute the required control actions between propellers, tilt servos and control surfaces. Preliminary simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed control approach.