Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are an interesting tool for executing a wide variety of missions.
This thesis studies the design of a linear controller for the OmniMorph, a novel omnidirectional morphing UAV equipped with eight tiltable bidirectional rotors. By tilting the rotors, the platform can change its configuration mid-flight in order to adapt to the requirements of a mission. A model of the platform is used to study the capabilities and limitations of the system, as well as provide a foundation for designing the controller. The controller will adapt to the tilt angle of the rotors, enabling it to fully exploit the capabilities at each tilt angle. To adapt to the operating point, two gain scheduling methods are proposed.
Firstly, a simple method with limited performance is presented, followed by a more sophisticated optimization algorithm that offers enhanced performance. These techniques are initially developed for a simplified 1D case, after which the extension of these techniques to the OmniMorph is studied. The results for the 1D case show that the gain scheduling methods successfully enable the controller to fully exploit the system’s capabilities at each operating point. Although the techniques have not yet been fully adapted to accommodate the OmniMorph, the partial results show promising progress.