Unified Trajectory Control for Vertical Take-Off and Landing Transition Aircraft

An aircraft configuration-agnostic strategy for unified trajectory control of a VTOL transition or a VTOL aircraft was introduced in this paper. Translation jerk dynamics, expressed in the Cframe, are derived from the rigid-body kinematics to determine the position jerk error dynamics and establish the necessary terms for generating the feedforward components of the commands from the unified trajectory control law. Besides these feedforward terms, the trajectory control law utilizes position, velocity and acceleration track error to produce specific force derivative commands. These commands can be interfaced with any type of configuration-dependent inner loop control law either directly or through an interfacing module, regardless of the inner loop control strategy employed. Essentially, the unified trajectory controller, in conjunction with the trajectory generation modules, facilitates the development of a configuration-agnostic guidance system framework capable of operating across the complete flight envelope of a VTOL transition aircraft.