Disturbance rejection control of a morphing UAV

This paper proposes a disturbance rejection control method for the path following problem of morphing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Firstly, path-following model of the morphing UAV is investigated and established, with the fuzzy reasoning method used to optimize the wing span under different flying conditions. The control system structure is divided into inner and outer loops. For the inner loop, robust disturbance observer is designed to attenuate complex compound disturbance caused by perturbation of model parameters, unknown aerodynamics and vibration. For the outer loop, a nonlinear controller is designed to stabilize the nominal model which is compensated by the disturbance observer. Simulation results show that the method proposed is effective with DOB estimation of the compound disturbance successfully.