Triple-Integral Control for Reduced-G Atmospheric Flight

In order to address the need for an autonomous reduced-gravity enabling platform, a novel flight-control architecture is formulated. The chosen control law employs a chain of three integrators, which takes advantage of the internal model principle to counteract the non linear aerodynamic forces impeding the vehicle's constant acceleration during parabolic flight. The control architecture and design is experimentally validated through flight tests on a variable-pitch multi-rotor by performing a Martian parabola (0.378 G), with a mean within 0.6% from the desired value and an RMSE of 0.0426 G. To the author's knowledge, this appears to be one of the few cases where the presence of a parabolic disturbance requires a triple-integral control architecture.