Aerospace applications

Abstract

This chapter presents several adaptive control applications with a particular focus on aerospace flight control applications. Two relatively simple pendulum applications are used to illustrate a nonlinear dynamic inversion adaptive control design method for tracking a linear reference model. The rest of the chapter presents several adaptive flight control applications for rigid aircraft and flexible aircraft. The chapter concludes with an application of the optimal control modification to a F-18 aircraft model. The flight control applications for rigid aircraft include the σ modification, e modification, bi-objective optimal control modification, least-squares adaptive control, neural network adaptive control, and hybrid adaptive control which combines model-reference adaptive control with a recursive least-squares parameter identification method. An adaptive control design for a flexible aircraft is presented using a combined adaptive law with the optimal control modification and adaptive loop recovery modification to suppress the dynamics of the aircraft flexible modes. An adaptive linear quadratic gaussian (LQG) design based on the optimal control modification for flutter suppression is presented. By taking advantage of the linear asymptotic property, the adaptive flutter suppression can be designed to achieve a closed-loop stability with output measurements.