Design of MPCs for a fixed wing UAV

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to examine a fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as it undergoes five flight scenarios under straight and level, level climb, level turn, climbing turn and level steady heading sideslip conditions in a desired and controlled manner using constrained multi input multi output (MIMO) model predictive controllers (MPCs). Design/methodology/approach – An MPC strategy based on the lateral and longitudinal linear models is proposed for the flight control design. Simulations are carried out for the nonlinear closed-loop aircraft Simulink model available from the University of Minnesota UAV research group with the implemented MIMO MPCs designed in this paper. Findings – The results of the simulations show that the MIMO MPCs can achieve satisfactory performance and flying qualities under three different test conditions in terms of existing unmeasured outputs and unmeasured output disturbances. Practical Implications – The MPCs designed in this paper can be implemented to UAVs. Therefore, the implementation is considered as an advanced research. Originality/value – The proposed MPC design in this paper provides more flexibility in terms of tracking complex trajectories comparing with the classical controllers in the literature. Besides they provide to change more than one reference of the states at any time.