Adaptive Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion for Attitude Control of Micro Air Vehicles

Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion is a sensor-based control approach that promises to provide high-performance nonlinear control without requiring a detailed model of the controlled vehicle. In the context of attitude control of micro air vehicles, incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion only uses a control effectiveness model and uses estimates of the angular accelerations to replace the rest of the model. This paper provides solutions for two major challenges of incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion control: how to deal with measurement and actuator delays, and how to deal with a changing control effectiveness. The main contributions of this article are 1) a proposed method to correctly take into account the delays occurring when deriving angular accelerations from angular rate measurements; 2) the introduction of adaptive incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion, which can estimate the control effectiveness online, eliminating the need for manual parameter estimation or tuning; and 3) the incorporation of the momentum of the propellers in the controller. This controller is suitable for vehicles that experience a different control effectiveness across their flight envelope. Furthermore, this approach requires only very coarse knowledge of model parameters in advance. Real-world experiments show the high performance, disturbance rejection, and adaptiveness properties.