Mixed adaptive control architecture for a novel coaxial-ducted-fan aircraft under time-varying uncertainties

This paper is concerned with a kind of mixed adaptive control architecture for a novel tandem coaxial-ducted-fan aircraft in the presence of relative large time-vary uncertainties and external disturbances. For the proposed aircraft, elementary analysis is first performed to evaluate the system's inherent sensitivity to uncertainty. The control architecture includes mainly two parts: a robust decoupling controller and a L1 adaptive augmentation. The robust decoupling controller designed via H-infinity synthesis mainly provides states decoupling and ensures baseline performance; while the L1 adaptive augmentation based on L1 adaptive theory is mainly responsible for large uncertainty estimation and compensation. Numerical simulations of this novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) are applied to illustrate the performances of the proposed control architecture. The simulation results reveal that compared to the classic robust method, the proposed controller is more effective and shows much improvement even under relative serious uncertainties and external disturbances.