Capabilities of long-range flight and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) are essential for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). Tiltrotor VTOLs have the advantage of balancing control simplicity and system complexity due to their redundant control authority. Prior work on controlling these aircraft either requires separate controllers and switching modes for different vehicle configurations or performs the control allocation on separate actuator sets, which cannot fully use the potential of the redundancy of tiltrotor. This paper introduces a unified MPC-based control strategy for a customized tiltrotor VTOL Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which does not require mode-switching and can perform the control allocation in a consistent way. The incorporation of four independently controllable rotors in VTOL design offers an extra level of redundancy, allowing the VTOL to accommodate actuator failures. The result shows that our approach outperforms PID controllers while maintaining unified control. It allows the VTOL to perform smooth acceleration/deceleration, and precise coordinated turns. In addition, the independently controlled tilts enable the vehicle to handle actuator failures, ensuring that the aircraft remains operational even in the event of a servo or motor malfunction.

翻译：长航程飞行与垂直起降（VTOL）能力是城市空中交通（UAM）的关键需求。倾转旋翼VTOL凭借其冗余控制权限，在控制简易性与系统复杂度之间实现了平衡。现有关于此类飞行器控制的研究，要么针对不同构型要求采用独立控制器并切换控制模式，要么在分离的作动器组上执行控制分配，未能充分利用倾转旋翼冗余控制的潜力。本文针对定制化倾转旋翼VTOL无人机（UAV）提出了一种基于模型预测控制（MPC）的统一控制策略，该策略无需模式切换，并能以一致方式执行控制分配。VTOL设计中集成四个独立可控旋翼提供了额外冗余度，使其能够应对作动器故障。结果表明，本方法在保持统一控制的同时，性能优于PID控制器；VTOL可实现平滑加减速与精准协调转弯。此外，独立控制的倾转机构使飞行器能够处理作动器故障，确保即便舵机或电机发生故障，飞行器仍能维持运行。