L₁ Adaptive Dynamic Inversion Controller for an X-wing Tail-sitter MAV in Hover Flight

This paper presents a hover flight attitude controller for a tail-sitter vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) micro aerial vehicle (MAV). The MAV named Novlit-3 combines a novel non-orthogonal X shaped wing layout with a single propeller, which is capable for high efficient cruise and prop-hang hover. Considering the nonlinear unstable dynamics and disturbance sensitivity of the VTOL MAV, we apply the L₁ adaptive control theory to augment the baseline dynamic inversion controller. The L₁ adaptive augmentation acts on the angular dynamics, estimating and compensating the time-varying uncertainty with fast adaptation rate and appropriate time-delay margin. The flight validation is executed on the Novlit-3 VTOL MAV.