Acceleration-Based Control of Fixed-Wing UAVs for Guidance Applications

2026-02-27

AI Summary

This work proposes an acceleration-level outer-loop control framework for fixed-wing UAVs, which cannot directly track acceleration commands due to the need to realize them indirectly through attitude and thrust within the flight envelope. The framework maps tangential and normal acceleration commands into body-rate and normalized thrust commands compatible with standard flight controllers. Specifically, under a small-angle assumption, an engineering mapping from normal acceleration to roll and pitch rate commands is established, while flight-test data are leveraged to construct an energy–thrust relationship, circumventing complex propulsion modeling. An energy-based control concept and a priority coordination mechanism are introduced to handle actuator saturation and non-level-flight maneuvers. Flight experiments on a VTOL fixed-wing platform demonstrate high-accuracy acceleration command tracking and successful implementation of a proportional navigation guidance law using only body-rate and normalized thrust interfaces.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Behavior Learning & Control
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Model-Based Reasoning
• Computer Vision: Low Level & Physics-based Vision

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Acceleration-commanded guidance laws (e.g., proportional navigation) are attractive for high-level decision making, but their direct deployment on fixed-wing UAVs is challenging because accelerations are not directly actuated and must be realized through attitude and thrust under flight-envelope constraints. This paper presents an acceleration-level outer-loop control framework that converts commanded tangential and normal accelerations into executable body-rate and normalized thrust commands compatible with mainstream autopilots (e.g., PX4/APM). For the normal channel, we derive an engineering mapping from the desired normal acceleration to roll- and pitch-rate commands that regulate the direction and magnitude of the lift vector under small-angle assumptions. For the tangential channel, we introduce an energy-based formulation inspired by total energy control and identify an empirical thrust-energy acceleration relationship directly from flight data, avoiding explicit propulsion modeling or thrust bench calibration. We further discuss priority handling between normal and tangential accelerations under saturation and non-level maneuvers. Extensive real-flight experiments on a VTOL fixed-wing platform demonstrate accurate acceleration tracking and enable practical implementation of proportional navigation using only body-rate and normalized thrust interfaces.

Problem

• fixed-wing UAV
• acceleration-commanded guidance
• flight-envelope constraints
• attitude control
• thrust control

Innovation

• acceleration-based control
• fixed-wing UAV
• proportional navigation
• energy-based thrust modeling
• body-rate command