Controller Design and Flight Experiments for the Dual Tilt Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in Helicopter Mode

Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are the important flying stage of tilt rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (TR-UAV) in helicopter mode. Therefore, the performance of the controller for the helicopter mode will directly impact the safety of DTR-UAV during VTOL stage. To solve this problem, a passivity theory based controller for helicopter mode of dual tilt rotor UAV (DTR-UAV) is proposed and the stability of the method is proved in this work. In the first, the system model of dual tilt rotor is built and divided into longitudinal and lateral dynamic model. Then based on the passivity theory, the robust controller is designed and proved. Finally and more importantly, a dual tilt rotor experiment platform is designed and implemented to verify the feasibility and validity of the proposed method. The results of simulation and experiment show the good performance of the proposed controller.