Practical active disturbance-rejection solution to a fly wing UAV flight control within full envelope

Based on linear active disturbance-rejection control (LADRC) theory, a full envelope flight controller is designed for high aspect ratio flying wing unmanned aerial vehicles. This controller consists of two parts, which are inner attitude controller and outer trajectory controller. In attitude controller design, an anti-delay LADRC is proposed to handle effects of control delay and actuator dynamic process, which can cause response oscillation in normal LADRC. In trajectory controller design, considering the UAV aerodynamic characteristic, we design respectively the altitude controller, heading angle controller and lateral deviation tracking controller for each common flight mode. Simulation results show that the designed controller has high value of control performance index and strong robustness when parameter uncertainty and severe wind disturbance exist. Compared with conventional methods, we find that the proposed controller has fewer parameters and a much simpler tuning process, providing a reference solution for further engineering application.