Real-time Switched Model Predictive Control of a Twin Rotor System

In this paper, we present a Switched-Decentralized Model Predictive Control (S-DMPC) scheme for the real-time flight control of a Twin Rotor System (TRS). Due to highly nonlinear dynamics and unavailability of full-state information, the linearized TRS model contains modelling (linearization) errors which cause poor state-estimation and lead to controller performance degradation. In order to address this problem, we propose an MPC-based control scheme in which, the associated (linear) observer´s gain is switched according to the level of linearization error present in the model. Through experimental results, we show that the proposed S-DMPC scheme significantly improves TRS tracking in comparison to the Centralized-MPC as well as the individual (non-switched) Decentralized-MPC schemes.