Keywords

vertical takeoff, tailsitter, unmanned aircraft, attitude estimation, attitude control

Abstract

The tailsitter aircraft merges the endurance and speed of fixed-wing aircraft with the flexibility and VTOL abilities of rotorcraft. Because of the requirement to be functional at a full range of attitudes, quaternions are typically employed to calculate attitude error. Attitude control is then accomplished by using the vector component of the error quaternion to drive flight control surfaces. This paper demonstrates that this method of driving the flight control surfaces can be suboptimal for tailsitter type aircraft and can lead to undesired vehicle movement. An alternate method of calculating attitude error called resolved tilt-twist is improved and validated. The resolved-tilt twist method is implemented in hardware and hardware-in-loop simulation results are presented.

Original Publication Citation

Beach, J. Argyle, M., McLain, T, Beard, R., and Morris, S. Tailsitter Attitude Control Using Resolved Tilt-Twist, Proc. International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, pp. 768-779, May 2014, Orlando, Florida.

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2014-5

Permanent URL

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/3851

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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