Suárez Fernández, Ramón A. (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid), Dominguez, Sergio (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid), Campoy, Pascual (Universidad Politecnica Madrid)

L1 Adaptive Control for Wind Gust Rejection in Quad-Rotor UAV Wind Turbine Inspection

Scheduled for presentation during the "UAS Control - III" (FrC5), Friday, June 16, 2017, 16:40−17:00, San Marco Island

2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, June 13-16, 2017, Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, Miami, FL,

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 25, 2024

Abstract

This work presents preliminary results of the control method developed for autonomous inspection of wind turbines. High wind gusts are a major deterrent of outdoor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) operations, in which, common classical control methods such as Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control do not perform well. Therefore, more robust adaptive control methods must be employed. We propose the use of an L1 adaptive velocity controller that is capable of fast adaptation and guaranteed robustness while withstanding any disturbances encountered during flights. Considerable increase in performance of the L1 adaptive controller is demonstrated by comparing the proposed approach to a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) method in simulation and a benchmark PID controller in several real flight experiments with added wind gusts.