A High-Performance Sensor-Based Control for Complex Maneuvers of Ducted Fan Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a sensor-based approach for control of ducted fan UAVs. In the inner-most loop control design that suffers from complex aerodynamics, we employ an Incremental Nonlinear Dynamics Inversion (INDI) controller such that only a simplified vehicle dynamics is needed while ensuring the robustness and response time. To account for the highly coupling effects of the longitudinal dynamics, we propose a sensor-based Total Energy Control System (TECS), in which we take advantage of the accelerators to obtain non-conservative forces, liberating the design from dynamics model. The effectiveness of the approach is validated through simulation using a real model of a small ducted fan UAV.