Modelling and control of unmanned flying boat with sensor offsets

An unmanned flying boat is an aircraft which is designed to take off and land on water. The unmanned flying boat is useful as an emergency aerial observation method. In previous researches, we have developed the small flying boat controlled by the human operator. In this paper, we consider automatic control for the flying boat. However, since the flying boat is used the gyro sensor, the sensor offset may occur by that surrounding humidity and temperature changes, aging, external vibrations, mechanical stress, and so on. The sensor offset produces non-zero steady-state input and output signals, even if the flying boat is stabilized. In previous research, it has been investigated that steady-state blocking zeros of the stabilizing controller play an important role. Such a controller is called a washout controller. In this paper, we apply the washout controller to the stabilization for the flying boat with the sensor offset. Then, we show that the washout controller eliminates the bias in the steady-state and stabilizes the flying boat. Moreover, we show some simulation results which illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.