posted on 2025-05-09, 11:40authored byMaria SeronMaria Seron, Tor A. Johansen, José A. De Doná, Andrea Cristofaro
Icing is regarded as a severe structural alteration affecting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), since ice accretion on wings and control surfaces modifies the aircraft shape resulting in altered controllability and performance of the vehicle. We study the problem of detection of icing and estimation of its `severity' factor in longitudinal control of UAVs. We propose to employ a bank of unknown input observers (UlOs), each designed to match a model of the aircraft under a particular level of icing taken from a quantisation of the icing's severity factor range of variation. The UIO design exploits the change in equilibrium conditions, caused by the icing effect, to identify a direction in the observer estimation error space that allows for aircraft icing detection and estimation. By selecting at each time the observer from the bank that yields the smallest value of a suitable residual signal, the icing severity factor can be estimated with an accuracy that is inversely proportional to the size of the quantisation level.
History
Source title
Proceedings of the 2015 5th Australian Control Conference (AUCC)
Name of conference
2015 5th Australian Control Conference (AUCC)
Location
Gold Coast, Qld.
Start date
2015-11-05
End date
2015-11-06
Pagination
87-92
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)