Design of a control system for an organic flight array based on a neural network controller

Abstract

This paper presents a flight control system for an organic flight array (OFA) with a new configuration consisting of multimodularized ducted-fan unmanned aerial vehicles. The OFA has a distinguished advantage of assembling or separating with respect to its missions or operational conditions because of its reconfigurable structure. Therefore, designing a controller that can be flexibly applied in each situation is necessary. First, a dynamic modeling of the OFA based on a single ducted-fan vehicle is performed. Second, the inner loop for attitude control is designed through dynamic model inversion and a PD controller. However, an adaptive control component is needed to flexibly cope with the uncertainty because the operating environment of the OFA is varied, and uncertainty exists depending on the number of modules to be assembled and disturbances. In addition, the performance of the neural network adaptive controller is verified through a numerical simulation according to two scenarios.