Nonlinear Large Maneuver Control of Thrust Vector UAV for Flying-Wing Layout

Abstract

The flying-wing layout UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) adopts the aerodynamic layout of wing-body fusion. Compared with conventional aircraft, the cancellation of vertical tail and other protruding components reduces the cross-sectional area of radar reflection, but also brings about directional static instability, transverse & longitudinal aerodynamic coupling and other defects, which bring challenges to the design of control law. Therefore, an improved dynamic inverse algorithm is proposed in this paper, which constructs a pseudo-linear system to eliminate nonlinear factors of the original system. Moreover, the effectiveness of the method is verified by route-tracking simulation. Since the relative shorter steering force arm and rapid decrease of control surface efficiency, flying-wing UAV is difficult to realize maneuver flight only by relying on the aerodynamic moment. Therefore, this paper designs a control allocation method based on serial-chain. The additional control moment generated by the vector thrust is used to compensate for the shortage of aerodynamic moment. The maneuverability of the aircraft is effectively enhanced and the simulation of Immelman large maneuver is completed.