Longitudinal inner loop flight controller design by using L1 adaptive control theory

Abstract

In the following paper, L1 adaptive control theory is used to design a controller for longitudinal short-period aircraft pitch. This controller accounts for the uncertainties of the aircraft model and the lack of robustness of existing methods. The aircraft handling qualities of six groups of different flight cases were used to build this model, regarding the uncertainties of the aircraft model as time-varying parameters. Our simulation results show that the controller can ensure that the system output asymptotically tracks the output of an ideal system with quantifiable transient and steady-state performance bounds.