Differential Flatness of Lifting-Wing Quadcopters Subject to Drag and Lift for Accurate Tracking

In this article, we propose an effective unified control law for accurately tracking agile trajectories for lifting-wing quadcopters with different installation angles, which have the capability of vertical takeoff and landing as well as high-speed cruise flight. First, we derive a differential flatness transform for the lifting-wing dynamics with a nonlinear model under coordinated turn condition. To increase the tracking performance on agile trajectories, the proposed controller incorporates the state and input variables calculated from differential flatness as feedforward. In particular, the jerk, the 3-order derivative of the trajectory, is converted into angular velocity as a feedforward item, which significantly improves the system bandwidth. At the same time, feedback and feedforward outputs are combined to deal with external disturbances and model mismatch. The control algorithm has been thoroughly evaluated in outdoor flight tests, which show that accurate trajectory tracking can be achieved.