In this dissertation, a terrain and path following controller is designed for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) considering the attitude constraint. The attitude constraint limits the roll and pitch angles of the UAV to be maintained within t...
In this dissertation, a terrain and path following controller is designed for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) considering the attitude constraint. The attitude constraint limits the roll and pitch angles of the UAV to be maintained within the desired ranges. The proposed controller controls the UAV to follow a predefined path and the altitude above ground level (AGL) to track the AGL command. The control barrier function (CBF) and exponential control barrier function (ECBF) are utilized to satisfy the attitude constraint. The proposed controller consists of the terrain and path following guidance law and the flight path controller.
In the first part of this study, the terrain and path following guidance law is designed. The guidance law consists of the terrain following controller and the horizontal path following controller. In the terrain following controller, the AGL of the UAV is controlled to track the AGL command. The distance between the UAV and the path is controlled to stay at zero in the horizontal path following controller. Both controllers are designed using the Lyapunov-based approach.
In the second part of this study, the flight path controller is designed using the CBF. The CBF-based flight path controller consists of three feedback loops. State-feedback controllers are designed using the sliding mode control scheme in the outermost loop and the inner-loop. In the second-outer loop, a quadratic programming (QP)-based controller is designed to control the sideslip angle while satisfying the attitude constraint. The control Lyapunov function is adopted to determine the QP constraint for the sideslip angle control, and the CBF is used to obtain the QP constraint for the attitude constraint.
In the third part of this study, the flight path controller is designed using the ECBF. The ECBF-based flight path controller consists of the nominal controller and the ECBF controller. The nominal controller is designed to generate the nominal command that controls the attitude to maintain the trim values. The nominal controller consists of three feedback loops. The controllers for each control loop are designed using the sliding mode controller (SMC). In the ECBF controller, the ECBF constraints corresponding to the attitude constraints are obtained. A QP is formulated using the ECBF constraints. The nominal commands from the nominal controller are used to formulate the QP. The actuator trim input is used in the cost function of the QP to reduce control effort. The actuator commands are obtained by solving the QP. Numerical simulation is performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controllers.