A Cascaded Control Law Design of Tilting-Ducted Fan eVTOL Aircraft for Thrustborne Phases

This paper designed a cascaded flight control law for tilting ducted fan eVTOL during thrustborne phases without conventional aerodynamic control surfaces. We control the fan rotational speed to achieve the purpose of controlling the aircraft’s attitude and speed. The key points lie in below. (1) using a reference model to modify the input signals so that they are more in line with the dynamic characteristics of the aircraft; (2) introducing dynamic inversion in each level of the controller to decouple the various control channels coupled by the plane-symmetric configuration; (3) introducing a fitting-based incremental control allocation method, which calculates the control allocation matrix according to fan characteristics and then solves the required fan rotational speed increments. Based on the Nonlinear model of the plane-symmetric aircraft and the control law, we jointly establish a simulation model and successfully carry out software-in-the-loop simulations. This provides a solution for the control of such tilting ducted eVTOL and also conducts a valuable exploration for the future development of Urban Air Mobility.