Robust Nonlinear Control of Miniature Fixed-Wing UAVs

This work focuses on the problem of letting the longitudinal dynamics of a miniature fixed-wing aerial vehicle to track a desired reference trajectory robustly with respect to possible uncertainties and exogenous disturbances such as, in particular, wind. As a main novelty, the proposed stabilizing controller is based on a numerical model inversion in which the nonlinear aerodynamic model obtained from experimental data is taken directly into account. The effectiveness and limitations of the proposed controller with respect to other approaches based on different approximations of the aerodynamic coefficients are pointed out both from a methodological viewpoint and by means of numerical results obtained with realistic aerodynamic models.