Control system design of flying-wing UAV based on nonlinear methodology

In this paper, A fluid vector rudder flying-wing UAV is employed as the design object, so as to study the nonlinear design method and flight validation. For the maneuvering flight control, this paper presents a control structure. This control structure included the inner loop linearization decoupling methods to eliminate the known negative coupling and the outer loop backstepping methods for trajectory tracking control. The stability of the control structure has been proved in this paper. Compared with the traditional backstepping control method, this controller increases the inner loop decoupling structure and retains the aerodynamic damping term which makes the linearized system a weak nonlinear system. This structure can not only reduce the conservatism of the outer loop controller design, but also is convenient for engineering implementation. Simulation and flight validation results show that the proposed control scheme is effective. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.