Optimal transition maneuvers for a class of V/STOL aircraft

This paper focuses on the problem of computing optimal transition maneuvers for a particular class of tail-sitter aircraft able to switch their flight configuration from hover to level flight and vice versa. Both minimum-time and minimum-energy optimal transition problems are formulated and solved numerically in order to compute reference maneuvers to be employed by the onboard flight control system to change the current flight condition. In order to guide the numerical computation and to validate its results, in a first stage approximated solutions are obtained as a combination of a finite number of motion primitives corresponding to analytical trajectories of approximated dynamic models. The approximated solution is then employed to generate an initial guess for the numerical computation applied to a more accurate dynamic model. Numerical trajectories computed for a small scale prototype of tail-sitter aircraft are finally presented, showing the effectiveness of the proposed methodology to deal with the complex dynamics governing this kind of systems.