Control of a Hovering Mini Fixed Wing Aerial Vehicle

This paper describes an approach for designing a stabilizing control strategy of a mini fixed wing aerial vehicle in hovering mode. This flight mode gives the ability to navigate inside a constrained environment. An inertial measurement unit is used to measure the attitude. The increased mass due to the on-board sensor poses a greater challenge to developing a functional autonomous vehicle than previous studies that employed o-board sensors for attitude sensing. Linear transfer functions are proposed for attitude with slow transits modeling. The design is achieved with a frequency domain method involving the Nichols chart. The control of a hovering vehicle requires ecient tuning methods capable of insuring robustness to account for model errors. Simulation and flight test results are presented to show the performance obtained with the proposed tuning method.