Full-envelope flight control for a multi-rotor Cessna-182 eVTOL

Abstract

This paper considers the flight control for an electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicle, whose configuration is based on the fixed-wing Cessna 182 mounted with additional 4 tilting rotors to provide helicopter flight characteristics. Consequently, 2 flight modes are identified for this vehicle: helicopter mode and airplane mode. For the purposes of simple tuning and easy implementation, we exploit Proportional-Integral-Derivative methods in each flight mode for the control law design. The transition between the 2 modes are controlled based on a feedforward gain scheduling technique, which is typical for tiltrotor configurations. The performances of the controllers are first examined on the simplified/linearised models before they are tested on the nonlinear one, which leads to increased confidence in practice. The simulation results show that the control outcome is successful, in the sense that the vehicle can stabilise and provide fast tracking in each mode. Moreover, no significant changes in the flight properties are observed during the transition period.