Novel Moving Mass Flight Vehicle and Its Equivalent Experiment

This paper presents a novel configuration of flight vehicle with moving mass control. We focus on the development of the proposed control mechanism and investigate the feasibility of an equivalent experimental setup. First, the effect of the moving mass parameters on the control authority is investigated. Then, a control law based on immersion and invariance (I&I) theory is presented for the moving mass control system. In the design process, we select a first-order target system to reduce the difficulty of controller design. To deal with the coupling caused by the additional inertia moment, which is generated by the motion of the moving mass, the extended state observer (ESO) is designed. The proposed adaptive controller is simulated and tested on the experimental setup. Finally, the simulation results validate the quality of the proposed adaptive controller, which ensures a good performance in the novel configuration with internal moving mass.