Design of Nonlinear Flight Control Law for a Tailless Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

The active disturbance rejection control (ADRC) techniques based on nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) method were proposed for a tailless unmanned aerial vehicle nonlinear flight control law design problem. The dynamics to be controlled were separated into two groups. For each group the corresponding control loop could be designed and the integrated controller was constructed by cascading them. The controller was compared with classic NDI method and shown to yield better performance in terms of disturbance rejection and robustness capabilities. Simulation results also showed the controller designed from one equilibrium condition could perform excellently in large flight envelope.