Control System Design of Tilt Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are those flying aircrafts that run without any humans being onboard. They are controlled either by an onboard computer or remote controllers. Utilizing UAVs for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) is beneficial in both military and civil applications. The various usages of these kinds of aircrafts are in different military missions such as battle damage assessment, communications relay, minesweeping, hazardous substances detection. However they can be used in other than military missions like monitoring the deployment of ballistics and projectiles while testing and locating there fall of shot. Aircrafts that are able of hovering and vertical flying can be used for this type of specific assignment. Having vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities and fast gliding provisions, tiltrotor aircraft is a very handy model which is perfectly compatible for many applications, which a nominal RC glider or a hovering helicopter may not perform efficiently. Combining the property of fast gliding of RC gliders and stable hovering capabilities of RC helicopter/quad copter, the tiltrotor mechanism works satisfactorily in spite of its complex flight dynamics. This mechanism presents a challenge for flight control designers and handling qualities engineers. Achieving consistent handling qualities and dynamic stability throughout an operational flight envelope is difficult since the aircraft’s flight dynamics change significantly at different operating conditions (e.g. speed, attitudes, etc.) and configurations (e.g. helicopter mode, conversion mode or airplane mode). The requirement to meet both helicopter and fixed wing flying qualities specifications always results in substantial cost and time. Development of integrated methods for flight control design and handling qualities analysis could greatly enhance the future of tiltrotor aircraft and can widen the sphere of UAV applications.