A hovering control strategy for a tail-sitter VTOL UAV that increases stability against large disturbance

Abstract

The application range of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) is expanding along with performance upgrades. Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft has the merits of both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft. Tail-sitting is the simplest way for the VTOL maneuver since it does not need extra actuators. However, conventional hovering control for a tail-sitter UAV is not robust enough against large disturbance such as a blast of wind, a bird strike, and so on. It is experimentally observed that the conventional quaternion feedback hovering control often fails to keep stability when the control compensates large attitude errors. This paper proposes a novel hovering control strategy for a tail-sitter VTOL UAV that increases stability against large disturbance. In order to verify the proposed hovering control strategy, simulations and experiments on hovering of the UAV are performed giving large attitude errors. The results show that the proposed control strategy successfully compensates initial large attitude errors keeping stability, while the conventional quaternion feedback controller fails.