Aircraft control using nonlinear dynamic inversion in conjunction with adaptive robust control

Abstract

This thesis describes the implementation of Yao’s adaptive robust control to an aircraft control system. This control law is implemented as a means to maintain stability and tracking performance of the aircraft in the face of failures and changing aerodynamic response. The control methodology is implemented as an outer loop controller to an aircraft under nonlinear dynamic inversion control. The adaptive robust control methodology combines the robustness of sliding mode control to all types of uncertainty with the ability of adaptive control to remove steady state errors. A performance measure is developed in to reflect more subjective qualities a pilot would look for while flying an aircraft. Using this measure, comparisons of the adaptive robust control technique with the sliding mode and adaptive control methodologies are made for various failure conditions. Each control methodology is implemented on a full envelope, high fidelity simulation of the F-15 IFCS aircraft as well as on a lower fidelity full envelope F-5A simulation. Adaptive robust control is found to exhibit the best performance in terms of the introduced measure for several different failure types and amplitudes.