Consensus-Based Powered Cruise and Yaw Controls for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Distributed Electric Propulsion System

The distributed electric propulsion (DEP) system has been favored over the conventional centralized propulsion system in applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, most existing techniques in propulsion system management adopt centralized control approaches, which could not fully utilize the decentralized features brought out by the DEP system. This article proposes a novel control approach for UAVs with the DEP system (DEP-UAV). The propellers in the DEP system are coordinated in a distributed manner to collectively regulate the UAV’s flight speed and course angle, which are known as powered cruise and yaw controls. To prevent the UAV from stalling out, the powered cruise and yaw controls over each propeller are designed to be sufficiently decoupled. Detailed controller designs and stability analyses are presented. The proposed distributed control algorithm has been fully implemented on hardware devices and validated on a controller hardware-in-the-loop (C-HIL) testbed for DEP-UAV. The experimental results indicate that without the decoupling between cruise and course controls, the DEP-UAV becomes unstable after 100 s and ultimately stalls. However, with the proposed control system in place, a deviation in flight speed is efficiently corrected with minimal overshoot, and the desired course angle adjustment is achieved.