Robust flight control for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle using adaptive super-twisting approach

Abstract

In this paper, the design of attitude and airspeed controls for a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle by means of an Adaptive Super Twisting Algorithm approach is addressed. In order to implement these controllers and taking into account the difficulties for measuring some of its states, necessary information about inertial attitude and airspeed is estimated using Super-Twisting Observers. This control scheme increases robustness since it is not necessary to know the bound of the perturbations affecting the system or the exact values from the parameters of the system. Furthermore, due to the finite-time converge of the observer, the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme under unmodelled dynamics, noisy measurements and external disturbances.