Uniting local and global controllers for the Caltech ducted fan

Caltech's ducted fan experiment is used as a case study to investigate the properties of an algorithm for uniting local and global controllers proposed in [4]. To simplify the control design process and to illustrate robustness, the ducted fan is modeled as a linear system with input rate limits. The local controller is an (fairly aggressive) LQR state feedback while the (semi-)global controller is a much less aggressive LQR state feedback. Closed-loop simulation results are provided using a fully nonlinear model of the ducted fan derived from wind tunnel data. Experimental results are also provided using the actual Caltech ducted fan.