An Incremental Back-Stepping Control method for Compound Lift Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Recent years, compound lift unmanned aerial vehicle, combining the advantage of both fixed wing and rotor wing aircraft, are becoming popular in many fields, due to their capability of vertically takeoff and landing and high-speed cruising. The dynamics of the transit process from the rotor wing mode to fixed wing mode is difficult to obtained, and thus degrading the performance of the controller. To deal with this problem, this paper proposed a new control approach based on the concept of incremental back-stepping (IBKS) method. With feedback of actuator states and angular acceleration, IBKS provides increments of control which reduced dependency on mathematical model of aircraft system. Then, a tracking differentiator is applied to calculate the states of the aircraft dynamics for better estimation of angular accelerations. Comparative simulations demonstrate the tracking accuracy and robustness of IBKS controller under model uncertainties.