Design and Validation of a L1 Adaptive Controller for a mini-UAV Autopilot

The dynamics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is nonlinear and subject to external disturbances. The scope of this paper is the test of an L1 adaptive controller as au- topilot inner loop controller candidate. The selected controller is based on piecewise constant adaptive laws and is applied to a mini-UAV. Navigation outer loop parameters are regulated via PID algorithm. The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that the proposed control design can stabilize the nonlinear system, even if the controller parameters are selected starting from a decoupled linear model. The main advantages of this technique are: (i) the controller can be implemented for both linear and nonlinear systems without parameter adjustment or tuning procedure, (ii) the controller is robust to unmodelled dynamics and parametric model uncertainties. The design scheme of a customized autopilot is illustrated and different configurations (in terms of mass, inertia and airspeed variations) are analyzed to validate the presented approach.