Fast Hildreth-based Model Predictive Control of Roll Angle for a Fixed-Wing UAV

Abstract In this paper we consider model predictive control (MPC) design for roll angle control for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with multiple segmented control surfaces. The challenge of roll angle control for a fixed-wing UAV consists of switching between inner and outer aileron pairs with hard constraints due to safety, energy saving and switching actuators. The novelty consists of formulating a hybrid control problem as a switched linear constrained MPC-QP problem and switched state observer design for fixed-wing UAV. A fast novel QP-solver based on the active-set QP-solver Hildreth is developed to meet the real-time implementation sampling time of Ts = 10 ms. The designed MPC controllers are simulated using Matlab. Simulations and the CPU-time from the improved QP-solvers show MPC to be a very good solution for real-time roll angle control of fixed-wing UAVs.