Optimal Landing Control of eVTOL Vehicles Using ODE-Based Aerodynamic Model

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to optimal landing control of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles for potentially wide applications such as urban air mobility (UAM), passenger transportation, package delivery, and aircraft carrier landing missions. Our particular interest is to develop efficient algorithms that facilitate generation of accurate optimal landing trajectories for eVTOL vehicles under operational constraints considering high-fidelity aerodynamic models. As a preliminary study, we focus on the formulation of an optimal control problem with fixed time of flight and choose the control effort as the performance measure for a quadrotor eVTOL vehicle landing mission. The main contribution of this work is the incorporation of aerodynamic models driven by ordinary differential equations (ODEs) into the formulated optimal control problem to enable higher-fidelity landing solutions, which are of key importance for future eVTOL operations. The DJI Matrice 100 vehicle is used in the simulations, and preliminary results of two landing cases are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.