Developing Distributed Electric Propulsion Control System for Electric Vertical Takeoff and Landing / Urban Air Mobility Vehicles

Distributed-Electric-Propulsion (DEP) is a disruptive concept with the potential to introduce substantial improvements in future-air-vehicle performance, efficiency, and robustness. This concept utilizes a distribution of electrically-powered-propulsors across a vehicle to provide both the required thrust for flight, distributed actuation, as well as additional advantages associated with synergistic propulsion-airframe integration. The use of DEP to enable vehicle-control also provides new avenues to replace or augment control capabilities from traditional-control-surfaces. By utilizing propulsion-based-control, the sizing of traditional-empennage-surfaces can be decreased to reduce aircraft weight, or the distributed nature of propulsors can be used to provide control assurance under critical faults and failures of other systems for vehicle-control. eVTOL-vehicles with lift production from rotary or fixed wings and distributed-propulsive-system present unique control challenges since each electric-motor in these systems can be a source of lift, thrust, and actuation. Existing methods tend to use control techniques designed for fixed-wing-aircraft or multicopters. The proposed method will be (a) distributed/decentralized, (b) optimal/adaptive, and (c) capable of real-time control allocation that creates distributed-propulsive-actuation, and (d) integrable with conventional-control-surfaces if needed, (e) avoids magnitude and rate saturation of distributed propulsion control inputs. The effectiveness of the proposed framework will be demonstrated through simulation and experiments using eVTOL-vehicles.