Control of a VTOL Aircraft: Motion Planning and Trajectory Tracking

This study deals with some essential control problems of a vertical take-off and landing aircraft. In the first part of this paper we present a simple control strategy for state-to-state control. The resulting motion planning procedure for the nonlinear under-actuated system is in fact simple and based on the solution of a linear algebraic equation. Having established an open loop control strategy for state-to-state motion planning, effective closed-loop control schemes for stability and trajectory tracking are presented. Finally, some simulation results which demonstrate the controller performances, are demonstrated