Nonlinear Flight Control Techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In order to meet increasing demands on performance and reliability of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, nonlinear and adaptive control techniques are often utilized. These techniques are actively being studied to handle nonlinear aerodynamic and kinematic effects, actuator saturations and rate limitations, modeling uncertainty, and time varying dynamics. This chapter presents an overview of some tools and techniques used for designing nonlinear flight controllers for UAVs. A brief overview of Lyapunov stability theory is provided. Nonlinear control techniques covered include gain scheduling, model predictive control, backstepping, dynamic inversion based control, model reference adaptive control, and model based fault tolerant control.