Robust active suppression for body freedom flutter of a flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract Flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicles have received extensive attention over the past decade because of their excellent aerodynamic and stealth performance. However, the aeroelastic interaction problems among unsteady aerodynamics, flight dynamics, and structural dynamics, such as the body-freedom flutter, are still open. This paper presents the study of a robust control scheme for active body-freedom flutter suppression of a flexible flying-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. The control objective is to expand the boundary of body-freedom flutter and to enhance the control robustness to external unknown disturbance simultaneously. The paper begins with the modeling procedure of a parameter-varying aeroservoelastic plant for the design of control law. Then, it presents how to synthesize a robust controller so as to suppress the flutter instability for a wide flight range of dynamic pressures. Afterwards, the paper shows how to analyze the flutter stability of the closed-loop system and the robustness of the controller, respectively. The numerical results demonstrate that the proposed robust controller can not only expand the flutter boundary of the unmanned aerial vehicle by 30%, but also exhibit the strong robustness to external disturbance.