Incremental control implementation in a flying wing uncrewed aircraft

July 2, 2025

The Eye in the Sky project, within which this work is framed, explores the use of a high-altitude balloon as a complement to an uncrewed aerial vehicle in order to extend its flight time. The aircraft used by the project is a flying wing configuration, which offers efficiency advantages but poses challenges in control. The scope of this work is the development, implementation and real-world validation of a controller for the flying wing used in Eye in the Sky. To this end, high-level design was carried out in a MATLAB simulator, based on a simulator previously developed by the project, where the strategy of incremental nonlinear dynamics inversion was studied. The ArduPilot firmware was subsequently modified to include an integrated simulation of the flying wing and to ensure that roll, pitch and airspeed control were handled through the proposed architecture. Finally, flight tests of the developed controller were conducted, where its robustness was verified.

Authors in the community:

• 

  J

  João Paulo Martins Peixoto

  ist195807

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  J

  José Raul Carreira Azinheira

  ist12745

• 

  A

  Alexandra Moutinho

  ist13959

mechanical-engineering - Mechanical engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico