A Universal Controller for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become popular in a wide range of applications, including many military and civilian uses. State of the art control strategies for these vehicles are typically limited to a portion of the vehicle's flight envelope, and are tailored to a specific type of platform. This article presents a single physics-based controller capable of aggressive maneuvering for the majority of UAVs. The controller is applicable to UAVs with the ability to apply a force along a body-fixed direction, and a moment about an arbitrary axis, which includes UAVs such as multi-copters, conventional fixed-wing, agile fixed-wing, flying-wing with two thrusters, most tailsitters, and some tilt-rotor/wing platforms. We demonstrate autonomous flight for a quadrotor and agile fixed-wing aircraft in a simulation environment. To specifically demonstrate the extreme maneuvering capability of the control logic, we perform a rolling flip with the quadrotor and an aggressive turnaround with the fixed-wing aircraft, all using a single controller with a single set of gains.