Extended incremental non-linear control allocation (XINCA) for quadplanes

Hybrid UAVs have gained a lot of interest for their combined vertical take-off & landing (VTOL) and efficient forward flight capabilities. But their control is facing challenges in over-actuation and conflicting requirements depending on the flight phase which can easily lead to actuator saturation. Incremental Non-linear Control Allocation (INCA) has been proposed to solve the platform’s control allocation problem in the case of saturation or over-actuation by minimizing a set of objective functions. This work demonstrates INCA on quadplanes, an in-plane combination between a quadrotor and a conventional fixed-wing, and proposes an extension to control the outer loop. The novel controller is called Extended INCA (XINCA) and adds the wing orientation as a force-generating actuator in the outerloop control optimization. This leads to a single controller for all flight phases that avoids placing the wing at negative angles of attack and minimizes the load on hover motors. XINCA has low dependence on accurate vehicle models and requires only several optimization parameters. Flight simulations and experimental flights are performed to demonstrate the performance.