A real-time reference-command generator for the hover-to-cruise transition of VTOL Lift+Cruise aircraft that replaces offline, pointwise l1-norm minimization (which yields abrupt, non-smooth commands) with a time-varying optimization formulation. By leveraging a prediction-correction interior-point framework, the method derives and numerically integrates an ordinary differential equation whose solution tracks the time-varying optimizer, updating actuator reference commands continuously and thus producing smooth commands online. Two-dimensional Lift+Cruise simulations show it eliminates the abrupt transitions and input-saturation-driven tracking error of the non-smooth offline approach.
Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) Lift+Cruise aircraft combine rotor-borne hover and wing-borne cruise, and the transition between these modes is hard because the two dynamics are coupled and gene…