Antoine Drouin

Adaptive sliding mode control for quadrotor attitude stabilization and altitude tracking

Adaptive control algorithms are of interest in flight control systems design not only for their capability to improve performance and reliability but also for handling aerodynamic parameter uncertainties, external disturbances and modeling inaccuracies. In this paper, a direct adaptive sliding mode control is developed for the quadrotor attitude stabilization and altitude trajectory tracking. First, developed controller is applied without considering disturbances and parameter uncertainties. After, a centered white gaussian noise with some parameter uncertainties are added to the considered output vector, mass and inertia matrix, respectively. The synthesis of the adaptation laws is based on the positivity and Lyapunov design principle. Numerical simulations are performed showing the robustness of the proposed control technique.

Non-Linear Control Structures for Rotorcraft Positioning

The purpose of this communication is to apply and compare three different non-linear control approaches to the design of control structures with control laws allowing autonomous positioning and orientation for a four-rotor aircraft. Realistic rotorcraft flight dynamics are established and analyzed so that a reference three-layers control structure is defined. Then are introduced different non-linear control approaches: non-linear inverse control, backstepping control and differential flat control. The compatibility of these control approaches with the three-layer control structure is assessed and adaptations are .proposed so that they can cope with the guidance of the rotorcraft. The corresponding control laws are detailed and their expected performances are discussed. The simplification of these control laws around equilibrium conditions produces close quasi-linear proportional derivative controllers. A careful tuning of one of them provides a reference to evaluate the improvements resulting from the use of full non-linear control laws, when applied to the positioning and orientation problem. This evaluation is performed by simulation and numerical results are displayed for analysis.

Space-indexed aircraft trajectory tracking

Future Air Traffic Management (ATM) demands that flights to be more efficient while maintaining safety and improving flight predictability. Two major research groups Single European Sky (SESAR) and Next Generation Air Transportation system (NEXTGEN) are progressively researching on the concept of 4D trajectory management which aims to improve flight efficiency by integrating time into the 3D trajectory. Therefore the implementation of time-space based flight guidance controller will be investigated in this paper. Firstly, the reference tracking error equations with respect to the spatial variable is defined and later transformed into a reference tracking error with respect to time. Using nonlinear dynamic inversion, the control law is established to make the aircraft accurately follow 3D+T desired trajectories. A simulation is performed to explore the feasibility of the proposed guidance control law and it was found that the proposed guidance control law is able to accurately follow a 3D+T reference trajectory at the same time follow the overfly time constraint.

Design of air corridor structures for enhanced traffic performance

After introducing the concept of airstream as a special corridor organization, this paper proposes a design method to establish a network of such air corridors over a given geographic area. A case study involving East Asia is displayed.

REENGINEERING THE PAPARAZZI AUTOPILOT NAVIGATION SYSTEM

Abstract Over the past three years, the Paparazzi project has created a free micro air vehicle system. Emerging uses of unmanned air vehicles has entailed new interactions to control the flight. The project has now reached a milestone and requires a reengineering of the navigation kernel interface. After describing the current architecture of our system, we analyze the new needs arising from human machine interaction and flight management system. We then propose a layered design of the navigation functional core.