Adaptive Incremental Backstepping Flight Control

This thesis deals with the development of Adaptive Incremental Backstepping control laws for a high-performance aircraft model (F-16), in order to make the airplane robustly seek references in roll rate and angle of attack at a constant airspeed while minimizing sideslip. An Incremental Backstepping scheme that relies on estimates of the angular...

Nonlinear Control Allocation for a High-Performance Tailless Aircraft with Innovative Control Effectors: An Incremental Robust Approach

Conventional linear control allocation (LCA) methods fail to provide satisfactory performance in flight control systems (FCS) for aircraft with highly nonlinear and coupled control effector suites, especially for tailless aircraft with strong interactions between control effectors. This thesis implements an incremental nonlinear control...

Minimum drag control allocation for the Innovative Control Effector aircraft: Optimal use of control redundancy on modern fighters

The Innovative Control Effector model is a tailless delta-wing aircraft concept equipped with 11 control surfaces with overlapping functionality and two-directional thrust vectoring. The high level of redundancy makes it an interesting object for research on mission-specific control allocation. A (spline-based) incremental control allocation...

Cascaded incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion for MAV disturbance rejection

This paper presents the cascaded integration of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) for attitude control and INDI for position control of micro air vehicles. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the quadrotor flies in and out of a 10 m...

Quadrotor fault-tolerant incremental nonsingular terminal sliding mode control

This paper proposes incremental nonsingular terminal sliding mode control for a class of multi-input and multi-output nonlinear systems considering model uncertainties, external disturbances, and sudden actuator faults. This method is free from singularity because it does not involve any negative fractional power. The convergence time in both...

Incremental sliding mode flight control

The swift growth of air traffic volume stresses the importance of flight safety enhancement. Statistical data shows that fly-by-wire technology with automatic flight control systems can effectively reduce the fatal accident rate of loss of control in-flight. Although the dynamics of an aircraft are nonlinear and time-varying, it is common...

Direct Force Control for the ICE aircraft: A novel control strategy

This thesis presents a new control philosophy based on Direct Force Control (DFC) for over-actuated aircraft. It is predicated on simultaneously controlling all six Degrees of Freedom (DoF). The Innovative Control Effectors (ICE) aircraft with its thirteen-part control effector suite is the subject of study. Active-Set (A-S) based Incremental...

Design of Reinforcement Learning based Incremental Flight Control Laws for the Cessna Citation II(PH-LAB) Aircraft

Online Adaptive Flight Control is interesting in the context of growing complexity of aircraft systems and their adaptability requirements to ensure safety. An Incremental Approximate Dynamic Programming (iADP) controller combines reinforcement learning methods, optimal control and Online identified incremental model to achieve optimal adaptive...

Flight Control Design Using Hybrid Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control strategy, which has shown robustness against model uncertainties on various aerospace vehicles. The sensor-based nature of the method brings attractive properties which has made it popular in the last decade. INDI globally linearizes the system by making use of control...

Incremental Nonlinear Control for Aeroelastic Wing Load Alleviation and Flutter Suppression

This paper proposes an incremental nonlinear control method for aeroelastic sys- tem gust load alleviation and active flutter suppression. These two control objectives can be achieved without modifying the control architecture or the control parameters. The proposed method has guaranteed stability in the Lyapunov sense and also has robustness...

Optimal Variable Wing Camber Control using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Flight control systems enable the improvement of natural flying qualities and airframe performance of an aircraft. In this article, an incremental optimization control scheme is proposed to optimize a given performance objective set by the designer in an online fashion using limited model information. This scheme is applied to improve the...

Adaptive Nonlinear Incremental Flight Control for Systems with Unknown Control Effectiveness

This article exposes that although some sensor-based nonlinear fault-tolerant control frameworks including incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion control can passively resist a wide range of actuator faults and structural damage without requiring an accurate model of the dynamic system, their stability heavily relies on a sufficient...

Incremental nonlinear control applied to tiltrotor aircraft

Incremental nonlinear control is a promising control method that can be applied in controlling tasks that involve systems with highly nonlinear dynamics. Incremental nonlinear control is a feedback linearization method that requires less model knowledge than conventional Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion and is robust against model mismatches. This...

Attitude Control of a Tilt-rotor Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicle Using Incremental Control

By combining the ability to hover with a wing for fast and efficient horizontal flight, hybrid unmanned aircraft extend the flight envelope and therefore mission capabilities of unmanned aircraft. However, this comes at a cost: increased complexity control-wise and being more susceptible to wind disturbances. This susceptibility to wind gusts is...

Attitude Control of a Tilt-rotor Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicle Using Incremental Control

Tailsitter Micro Air Vehicles with two rotors are promising due to their simplicity and efficient forward flight, but actuator saturation due to ineffective pitch control at a high angle of attack flight is a challenge limiting the flight envelope. This paper proposes a novel tilt-rotor tailsitter design which features two tilting rotors as...

Incremental Nonlinear Control for Aeroelastic Wing Load Alleviation and Flutter Suppression

This paper proposes an incremental nonlinear control method for an aeroelastic system’s gust load alleviation and active flutter suppression. These two control objectives can be achieved without modifying the control architecture or the control parameters. The proposed method has guaranteed stability in the Lyapunov sense and also has...