A unified control strategy for autonomous aerial vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become popular in a wide range of applications, including many military and civilian uses. State-of-the-art control strategies for these vehicles are typically tailored to a specific platform and are often limited to a portion of the vehicle’s flight envelope. This article presents a single physics-based controller capable of aggressive maneuvering for the majority of UAVs. The controller is applicable to UAVs with the ability to apply a force along a body-fixed direction, and a moment about an arbitrary axis, which includes UAVs such as multi-copters, conventional fixed-wing, agile fixed-wing, most flying-wings, most tailsitters, some tilt-rotor/wing platforms, and some flapping-wing vehicles. We describe the implementation of this controller on numerous platforms, and demonstrate autonomous flight in outdoor flight tests for a quadrotor and an agile fixed-wing aircraft. To specifically demonstrate the extreme maneuvering capability of the control logic, we perform a rolling flip with the quadrotor and a rolling Harrier and an aggressive turnaround with the fixed-wing aircraft, all using a single controller.