Periodic Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles based on Differential Flatness

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are making increasingly long flights today with significantly longer mission times. This requires the UAVs to have longer endurance as well as have long range capabilities. With regards to this, many researchers have shown the non-optimality of the steady state flight of aircrafts and how periodic trajectories may benefit the cause. This work re-establishes the non-optimality of a steady state flight and proposes a sub-optimal periodic solution using the concept of differential flatness. An example of an Aerosonde UAV is used to illustrate the percentage improvement in cost of the periodic control solutions.