- Conference Article
- 10.23919/ccc64809.2025.11179556
Nonlinear Control of a Tilt-Rotor Aircraft Based on Super Twisting Control and Online RBF Neural Networks
- Jul 28, 2025
- Bing Yuan + 1 more +1
Tilt-rotor aircraft is a new type of aircraft that features tilting engine nacelle, allowing it to switch between helicopter mode and fixed-wing mode. It combines the maneuverability of traditional helicopters with the high-speed cruising capability of fixed-wing planes. However, the complex nonlinear and strong coupling properties of tilt-rotor aircraft brings great challenges for control design. The existing linear control methods rely on the linearized models at different operating points, while existing nonlinear control designs often require the simplification of the original nonlinear dynamic model, which limits the applicability of their control laws for the aircraft's actual flight envelopes. This paper presents a new nonlinear controller based on a super twisting attitude controller and an online Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network. By designing the super twisting attitude control law, the control torque for the tilt-rotor aircraft is obtained, and then the RBF network is used to approximate the inverse model of the aerodynamics of the original nonlinear dynamic model online, to compute the actual control inputs. The stability of this control method is proven through the Lyapunov based stability analysis. Finally, a simulation comparison is made with a linear PID-LQR attitude control algorithm, these results validate the effectiveness and good performance of the nonlinear control law proposed in this paper.
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