Aerodynamic Prior-Free Coordinated Trajectory Generation and Tracking Control for a Tail-Sitter UAV

Abstract:This paper presents a coordinated trajectory generation and tracking control framework for a tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which does not require aerodynamic priors identified for a specific airframe while addressing the challenge of flight control under highly nonlinear aerodynamics across the full flight envelope. The core innovation lies in employing phase-specific aerodynamic modeling strategies for planning and tracking, tailored to their distinct functional characteristics, without requiring airframe-specific aerodynamic priors. Specifically, the phi-theory model under coordinated flight is employed to derive an analytic differential flatness mapping, and a simplified but locally accurate model is established for predictive control to enable real-time aerodynamic parameter estimation. The proposed framework is evaluated extensively through both simulation and challenging real-world flight tests under mild wind conditions, showing high-precision tracking and adaptability across the tested aerodynamic conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first real-world demonstration of accurate trajectory tracking over tested flight regimes spanning the full envelope of a tail-sitter UAV without relying on aerodynamic identification campaigns. The source code of our framework is available at: this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.11698 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.11698v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.11698 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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