Modelling and Control of an Urban Air Mobility Vehicle Subject to Empirically-Developed Urban Airflow Disturbances

Abstract

Urban air mobility is expected to play a role in improving transportation of people and goods in growing urban areas while contributing to sustainable urban growth and zero-emissions future aviation. The research presented herein computationally investigated the performance of control laws for a generic Urban Air Taxi (UAT) subjected to empirically-developed urban airflow disturbances. This involved developing a representative flight dynamics model of a UAT in steady level cruise flight with an inner-loop autopilot. Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) and Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) control laws were implemented to investigate the controlled and uncontrolled acceleration responses and compare them to the acceleration limits in ISO 2631. Using a linear flight dynamics model, ADRC demonstrated improved performance over PID control with equal initial tuning effort. PID was able to reduce passenger accelerations to unharmful, though still uncomfortable, levels while ADRC further reduced the lateral accelerations to comfortable levels.