Control Strategies for Autonomous Navigation Gun Launched Micro Aerial Vehicle
Nowadays, the use of rotary-wing MAV for observation missions in hostile environments is constantly growing. These aircrafts, through their ability to perform both translation fl ights and hover, are indeed well appropriate for these missions. The study presented in this thesis deals with a new MAV concept called GLMAV (for Gun Launched Micro Aerial Vehicle), which consists in getting very quickly up and running a projectile - MAV hybrid vehicle. The di fficulty in controlling such vehicles is to ensure good trajectory tracking performances while guaranteeing robustness towards aerodynamic disturbances. After a modelling stage, the heart of the thesis introduces various control strategies, both linear and nonlinear, for the autonomous navigation of the MAV. Several approaches allowing the estimation and the consideration into the control of the parasitic eff orts caused by aerodynamic phenomena are also detailed. The eff ectiveness of the control algorithms is then shown through many numerical simulations. From a practical point of view, having a control law is not enough. Indeed, special filtering techniques or specifi c equipments have to be used to reconstruct the system state. The performances of the overall control loop are fi rstly tested in simulation before its implementation on the GLMAV prototype developed by the French-German research Institute of Saint-Louis.