Trajectory Manifold Exploration for the PVTOL aircraft

In this paper, we study the trajectory space of the PVTOL aircraft. We show that, due to the non-minimum phase nature of the system, more aggressive trajectories may be tracked with respect to the simplified differentially flat model. Given bounded C2trajectories of the center of gravity, we show that there exists a bounded roll trajectory which implements them. We compute an approximation of such roll trajectory using a Newton method for nonlinear optimization based on a trajectory tracking projection operator.