GWO-Based Gain-scheduling Controller Design for a Tilt-rotor UAV’s Longitudinal Control

This paper focuses on the flight mode transition controller design of a small scaled V-44 which is a quad-tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle combining the high-speed cruise and vertical take-off and landing capabilities. But there are some significant changes in aerodynamic characteristics during the mode transition which are difficult to measure. A model is established based on the momentum theory and Leaf integral method. To keep the height during the mode transition, a gain-scheduling controller is designed. Then the parameters of the controller is optimized by the Grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO). Numerical simulations are conducted and the results show the excellent performance of the GWO-based gain-scheduling controller.