Hovering flight stabilization in wind gusts for ducted fan UAV

This paper describes a control strategy to stabilize the position of a micro air vehicle in wind gusts despite unknown aerodynamic efforts. The proposed approach allows us to overcome the problem of gyroscopic coupling by taking advantage from both the structure of the thrust mechanism, which is made of two counter rotating propellers, and the control strategy which involves a decoupling of the yaw rate dynamics from the rest of the system dynamics. The controller is designed by means of backstepping techniques allowing the stabilization of the vehicle's position while on-line estimating the unknown aerodynamic efforts.