Adaptive attitude control of autogyro augmented with elevator

To deal with the problems of pitching control mode of conventional autogyro, a novel autogyro configuration augmented with elevator is proposed. The autorotating rotor is modeled with closed-form blade element methods, which is verified by comparing calculation results with data from wind tunnel tests and numerical integration blade element methods. Baseline attitude controller is designed based on dynamic inversion, and adaptive neural networks are used to estimate and eliminate the unknown uncertain inverse error caused by modelling error, external disturbances and design model error. Dynamic control allocation is used to coordinate the control efficiency and bandwidth differences between the elevator and the rotor longitudinal cyclic control. Simulation results show that the proposed autogyro configuration can effectively reduce the deflection frequency and amplitude of the rotor longitudinal cyclic control, the proposed controller has good performance and robustness, and the dynamic control allocator can coordinate the elevator and the rotor longitudinal cyclic control to achieve the desired moments.