Keywords

vertical takeoff, tailsitter, unmanned aircraft, quaternion, attitude control, hover

Abstract

The tailsitter is a promising airframe that can take off and land on its tail and transition to level flight. While this ability provides vertical takeoff and landing capabilities with no additional moving parts, it introduces interesting control challenges. In this paper, we look at the attitude control system of a tailsitter in hover flight and show that the behaviour of the aircraft relies on the method used to compute the attitude error. We investigate three different methods of computing the attitude error, quaternion feedback, resolved tilt twist, and the resolved Euler angles, and compare them through simulated hover flight.

Original Publication Citation

Argyle, M., Beach, J., Beard, R., McLain, T., and Morris, S. Quaternion Based Attitude Error for a Tailsitter in Hover Flight, Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp. 1396-1401, June 2014, Portland, Oregon.

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2014-6

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/3849

Publisher

IEEE

Language

English

College

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology

Department

Mechanical Engineering

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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