Attitude control of a fixed-wing UAV using thrust vectoring system

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a fixed-wing UAV with thrust vectoring system for improvement of fault tolerance. Generally, a flxed-wing UAV is controlled by using throttle and three moving surfaces that are aileron, elevator and ladder. If one of these actuators is damaged, fault tolerance can be guaranteed by designing a complicated flight control system that would requires processing of high calculation load. A thrust vectoring system treated in this paper can control the UAV without using any moving surfaces. Therefore, it is possible to control the UAV with a thrust vectoring system by applying simple control method. The thrust vectoring system consists of a double gimbal structure and two servo motors. Moreover, fault tolerance is realized by a simple structure and extremely lightweight. A nonlinear flight control system is designed by using extended state observer (ESO). The effectiveness of the proposed thrust vectoring system is verified by numerical simulation and experiment. We also show the developed thrust vectoring system.