Control Design for Tracking of Scaled MTE Trajectories on an IRIS+ Quadcopter

Development of handling qualities requirements and mission task elements to evaluate unmanned aerial vehicles are needed. Handling qualities requirements guide the development of the control system, a critical element on unmanned vertical lift aircraft that provide stability, disturbance rejection, and the ability to follow waypoints/trajectories. In this paper, scaled ADS-33E-PRF mission task elements are used to evaluate control system performance of a small vertical lift unmanned aerial system. A trajectory tracking and aggressiveness score is used to rate the performance of the mission task element performance. Additionally, nine control system designs with varying disturbance rejection properties are evaluated with respect to this scaling and scoring metric methodology. Evaluation of quantitative metrics, such as disturbance rejection bandwidth, relative to the scaled mission task element performance is a key step towards developing criteria for unmanned aerial systems. Flight test results for the IRIS+ quadcopter are presented as the example aircraft, and compared to previous results on an autonomous UH-60 as a point of qualitative verification of the scaling method.