Nonlinear adaptive flight control system:Performance enhancement and validation

The problem of decreasing stability margins in L1 adaptive control systems is discussed and an out-of-loop L1 adaptive control scheme based on Lyapunov’s stability theorem is proposed.This scheme enhances the effectiveness of the adaptation,which ensures that the system has suffi-cient stability margins to achieve the desired performance under parametric uncertainty,additional delays,and actuator faults.The stability of the developed control system is demonstrated through a series of simulations.Compared with an existing control scheme,the constant adjustment of the sta-bility margins by the proposed adaptive scheme allows their range to be extended by a factor of 4–5,bringing the stability margin close to that of variable gain PD control with adaptively scheduled gains.The engineered practicability of adaptive technology is verified.A series of flight tests verify the practicability of the designed adaptive technology.The results of these tests demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed control scheme with nonlinear parameter estimations under insufficient stability margins and validate its robustness in the event of actuator failures.

Robust gain-scheduled missile autopilot design based on multifrequency extended state observers

This paper describes the design and implementation of a three-axis acceleration control autopilot for an asymmetric tail-controlled,skid-to-turn tactical missile.In an earlier flight test,degraded autopilot performance was attributed to multiple disturbances and uncertainties and the presence of hidden coupling terms,giving rise to a miss distance of greater than 20 m.To address these issues,the missile dynamics are decomposed into the angular rate dynamics as fast and the acceleration dynamics as slow subsystem using the singular perturbation theory to analyze a multi-time-scale property.Multifrequency extended state observers are then incorporated into the gain scheduling technique to attenuate disturbances,thus enhancing the control performance significantly.In the proposed engineering/practical design framework for missile autopilot,simple,conventional,and explicit tuning rules are provided.And the proposed control scheme can achieve input-to-state stability across the entire flight envelope under unknown but bounded disturbances.The advantages of the method over existing benchmark approaches are shown through nonlinear numerical simulations.This is supported by evidence from a new flight test result with a miss distance of only 2 m.