XINCA: Extended Incremental Non-linear Control Allocation on the TU Delft Quadplane

Controlling over-actuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is an important task to achieve reliable fail-safe autonomous flight. Incremental Non-linear Control Allocation or INCA has been proposed to solve the platform’s control allocation problem by minimizing a set of objective functions with a method known as the Active Set Method. This work proposes an extension to INCA to control the outer loop of a quadplane UAV, an in-plane combination between a quadrotor and a conventional fixed-wing. The novel controller is called Extended INCA or XINCA and optimizes a mix of physical actuator commands and angular control setpoints fed to the vehicle’s inner loop. It does so while adapting to varying flight phases, conditions, and vehicle states, and taking into account the aerodynamic properties of the main wing. XINCA has low dependence on accurate vehicle models and requires only several optimization parameters. Flight simulations and experimental flights are performed to prove the performance of both controllers.