Nonlinear control of the PVTOL aircraft by numerical inversion of its behavioral model

This paper deals with the nonlinear control of the planar vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (PVTOL) using a simple, fast and nonlinear discrete time control approach. The proposed control approach uses an approximate numerical one-step time discretization of the nonlinear plant model behavior obtained from offline simulations. Using that discretization, a control minimizing the distance between the plant output and a reference linear system is computed, leading the system to adopt its dynamical behavior. Since the prediction horizon is limited to one time-step, the execution time of the algorithm can be completely bounded. It can thus easily be implemented and used to control fast electromechanical systems. Experimental results obtained from some simulations show the performance and robustness of the proposed controller.