Controlled Adaptive Flight of a Convertiplane Type Tricopter in Conditions of Uncertainty for Monitoring Water Areas

Currently, monitoring of water areas is one of the most important fields of study in terms of environmental protection aimed at guaranteeing the health of the citizens of different regions of the world. Monitoring data process makes possible to efficiently identify and accurately determine the coordinates of dangerous zones, as well as to track and predict the state of the water areas in study. In order to solve such kind of problems, in this paper we propose the use of a Flying Laboratory (FL) equipped with a water intake device and a software and hardware complex to control, receive, store and display the telemetric information from the FL. This paper is devoted to the mathematical modeling and research of the movement of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) type convertiplane-tricopter in the vertical longitudinal plane, taking into account the uncertainties of external wind parameters. To reduce the impact of these parameters on the control quality and compensate the lack of information at the design stage, an adaptive control method with a reference model represented by a first-order transfer function has been introduced. The use of an adapter allowed to minimize the tracking error, i.e. the difference between the output signal and the reference model. The use of an adaptive control method has minimized the tracking error. The introduced algorithms in the adaptive control system have become possible to provide the fastest suppression of external disturbances in comparison with the traditional PID control strategy for the case of linear description of the control object.