Autonomous Mission Management Based Nonlinear Flight Control Design for a Class of Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, a nonlinear flight control law is designed for a hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to achieve the advanced flight performances with the autonomous mission management (AMM). The hybrid UAV is capable of hovering like quadrotors and maneuvering as fixed-wing aircraft. The main idea is to design the flight control laws in modules. Those modules are organized online by the autonomous mission management. Such online organization will improve the UAV autonomy. One of the challenges is to execute the transition flight between the rotary-wing and fixed-wing modes. The resulting closed-loop system with the designed flight control law is verified in simulation and the simulation results demonstrate that the resulting closed-loop system can successfully complete the designated flight missions including the transition flight between the rotary-wing and fixed-wing modes.