26th Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences
including the 8th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference
14 - 19 September 2008, Anchorage, Alaska, USA
Paper ICAS 2008-5.9.2

ROBUST OPTIMAL DESIGN OF AN AUTOPILOT FOR TRANSITIONAL FLIGHTS OF A TAIL-SITTER MINI UAV

D. Kubo, S. Suzuki*
JAXA, Japan; *Univ. of Tokyo, Japan

Keywords: robust optimization, genetic algorithm, tail-sitter, unmanned aerial vehicle

The transition of tail-sitter vertical takeoff and landing mini-UAVs is a challenging problem, because the flight includes wide operating ranges with nonlinearity. To overcome the problem, a gain-scheduled controller and an offline-trained neural network reference generator was used. A variable environment genetic algorithm (VE-GA) was proposed to improve the robustness.

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