Dynamic modeling and flight control of a balloon-quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle

Davi Antonio Santos (1) , Americo Cunha Jr (2)

1 Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica
2 UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brasil] = Rio de Janeiro State University [Brazil] = Université d'État de Rio de Janeiro [Brésil]

The present work is concerned with the dynamic modeling as well as the design of position and attitude control laws for a balloon-multirotor vehicle consisting of an oblate spheroid helium balloon coupled with a quadrotor airframe. A six-degrees-of-freedom nonlin-ear dynamic model is derived for the balloon-quadcopter using the Newton-Euler approach. To capture the contact flexibility between the balloon and the airframe, the center of buoyancy is supposed to oscillate with second-order dynamics with respect to the airframe. Under the assumption of timescale separation between the translational and rotational dynamics, the attitude and position control laws are designed separately from each other. Both the attitude and position control laws are proportional-derivative actions plus feedforward compensation of nonlinearities combined with control input saturation within appropriate parallelepipedal sets. These constraint sets are carefully chosen in order to satisfy torque and force design bounds. Computer simulation is carried out to assess the performance of the proposed balloon-quadcopter control system under nominal conditions.

Mots clés: multirotor aerial vehicle; balloon-multicopter; flight control; balloon-quadcopter

Domaines: Vibrations [physics.class-ph]; Systèmes dynamiques [math.DS]; Automatique / Robotique

Davi Antonio Santos, Americo Cunha Jr. Dynamic modeling and flight control of a balloon-quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle. XXXVIII Ibero-Latin American Congress on Computational Methods in Engineering, Nov 2017, Florianópolis, France. ⟨10.20906/CPS/CILAMCE2017-0497⟩. ⟨hal-01633206⟩