A novel approach to the automatic control of scale model airplanes

Minh-Duc Hua (1) , Daniele Pucci (2) , Tarek Hamel (3, 4) , Pascal Morin (1) , Claude Samson (3, 4, 5)

1 ISIR - Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique
2 IIT - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
3 COMUE UCA - COMUE Université Côte d'Azur (2015-2019)
4 I3S - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis
5 CRISAM - Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée

— This paper explores a new approach to the control of scale model airplanes as an extension of previous studies addressing the case of vehicles presenting a symmetry of revolution about the thrust axis. The approach is intrinsically nonlinear and, with respect to other contributions on aircraft nonlinear control, no small attack angle assumption is made in order to enlarge the controller's operating domain. Simulation results conducted on a simplified, but not overly simplistic, model of a small airliner illustrate the soundness of the approach.

Mots clés: fixed-wing aircraft; dynamics of flight; nonlinear feedback control; aerial vehicles

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Minh-Duc Hua, Daniele Pucci, Tarek Hamel, Pascal Morin, Claude Samson. A novel approach to the automatic control of scale model airplanes. 53rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Dec 2014, Los Angeles, United States. pp.805 - 812, ⟨10.1109/CDC.2014.7039480⟩. ⟨hal-01377807⟩