English

Robust trajectory optimisation for transitions of tiltwing VTOL aircraft

Optimization and Control 2023-02-10 v1 Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

We propose a method to generate robust and optimal trajectories for the transition of a tiltwing Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft leveraging concepts from convex optimisation, tube-based nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Difference of Convex (DC) functions decomposition. The approach relies on computing DC decompositions of dynamic models in order to exploit convexity properties and develop a tractable robust optimisation that solves a sequence of convex programs converging to a local optimum of the trajectory generation problem. The algorithm developed is applied to an Urban Air Mobility case study. The resulting solutions are robust to approximation errors in dynamic models and provide safe trajectories for aggressive transition manoeuvres at constant altitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.04361,
  title  = {Robust trajectory optimisation for transitions of tiltwing VTOL aircraft},
  author = {Martin Doff-Sotta and Mark Cannon and Marko Bacic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.04361},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.14118