TL;DR
Context
[placeholder: Hybrid vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft combine the hovering agility of rotary-wing multicopters with the long-range cruise efficiency of fixed-wing airframes.] During the critical transition corridor[placeholder sidenote: Transition flight envelope occurs between 14 m/s and 22 m/s indicated airspeed under turbulent boundary conditions.], both rotor thrust and wing aerodynamics interact non-linearly.
The hard part
[placeholder: Aerodynamic control surfaces lack sufficient dynamic pressure at low airspeeds, while rotor downwash induces asymmetric stall across the lifting surfaces.]
Approach
[placeholder: Formulated a gain-scheduled L1 adaptive controller coupled with dynamic rotor-tilt allocation to continuously preserve control authority.]
What didn’t work
[placeholder: Pure feedback linearization led to actuator saturation and rapid battery voltage sag during aggressive pitch-up transitions.]
Results
[placeholder: Across hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) benchmarks and open-field flight trials, the controller reduced pitch attitude tracking error by 42% and transition duration by 1.8 seconds.]
Limits and next steps
[placeholder: Present formulation assumes rigid wing structure; future investigations will account for aeroelastic deflection under severe atmospheric turbulence.]
Cite this
@incollection{sparsh2025vtol,
title={Stabilizing VTOL aircraft through the transition phase},
author={Sparsh and Collaborators},
booktitle={Advanced Flight Dynamics and Autonomous Control},
publisher={Springer},
year={2025}
}My role
[placeholder: Led aerodynamic modeling, control law synthesis in MATLAB/Simulink, PX4 firmware integration in C++, and flight-log telemetry analysis.]