Robust fixed-time flight controller for a dual-system convertible UAV in the cruise mode

This paper investigates the attitude tracking control problem for the cruise mode of a dual-system convertible unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)in the presence of parameter uncertainties,unmodeled uncertainties and wind disturbances.First,a fixed-time disturbance observer(FXDO)based on the bi-limit homogeneity theory is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance of the convertible UAV model.Then,a fixed-time integral sliding mode control(FXISMC)is combined with the FXDO to achieve strong robustness and chattering reduction.Bi-limit homogeneity theory and Lyapunov theory are applied to provide detailed proof of the fixed-time stability.Finally,numerical simulation experimental results verify the robustness of the proposed algorithm to model parameter uncertainties and wind disturbances.In addition,the proposed algorithm is deployed in a open-source UAV autopilot and its effectiveness is further demonstrated by hardware-in-the-loop experimental results.

Research on Teaching Methods of Flight Control Principles

With the rapid development of China’s civil aviation industry,the teaching method of operating knowledge of flight principles has changed greatly,which creates a good implementation environment to improve the safety of civil aviation in our country.At present,the main training content of air route transport pilots in China is basic aviation theory,initial flight training,airline modification,etc.The principles of flight control are an important part of basic aviation theoretical knowledge training,which will involve a large number of flight technology training content,instructors will also be based on the pilot type.Teaching flight control theory and practical knowledge requires relatively high theoretical learning ability of students,and the learning effect of this part of theoretical knowledge will directly affect the quality of subsequent learning,but also directly affect the effectiveness of flight training.This paper focuses on the analysis of the basic concepts of flight control,studies the existing problems in the teaching of flight control principles,summarizes the teaching measures of flight control principles,aiming to provide a reference to teaching personnel.

MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF SELF-REPAIRING FLIGHT CONTROL

The most prospective method for certain structural failures and damages that cannot employ redundancy is self-repairing techniques, to ensure especially the maximum flight safety. Based on the characters of self-repairing aircraft, this paper states some basic assumptions of the self-repairing aircraft, and puts forward some special new conceptions concerning the self-repairing aircraft: control input, operating input, command input, repair input and operating and control factor as well as their relationships. Thus it provides a simple and reliable mathematical model structure for the research on the self-repairing control of the aircraft.

ADAPTIVE BACKSTEPPING FLIGHT CONTROL WITH ACTUATOR SATURATION

Because actuator satu ration can become a problem or even a disaster in flight control system, the con sideration of actuator saturation in the design phase may indeed reduce the degr ee of conservativeness of an flight control system (FCS) and thus noticeably enh ance the performance of the FCS. Deflection limits and rate limits are both cons idered in a new adaptive backstepping FCS design process. The key of the method is that a new control Lyapunov function (CLF) and a control law are chosen when the actuator saturation occurs. This idea results from that there must be a vari ation in the pseudo-control at saturation. The whole progress is a modification of an early presented method: adaptive backstepping control scheme. The stabili ty is proved and verified successfully. The conclusion and some comments about t his method are given in the end.

Survey on nonlinear reconfigurable flight control

An overview on nonlinear reconfigurable flight control approaches that have been demonstrated in flight-test or highfidelity simulation is presented. Various approaches for reconfigurable flight control systems are considered, including nonlinear dynamic inversion, parameter identification and neural network technologies, backstepping and model predictive control approaches. The recent research work, flight tests, and potential strength and weakness of each approach are discussed objectively in order to give readers and researchers some reference. Finally, possible future directions and open problems in this area are addressed.

Practical Survey on Design and Testing of Flight Control Laws for Helicopter Engineering Simulators

A practical survey on engineering implementation of flight control laws on helicopter engineering simulators is proposed.Advances of helicopter engineering simulators are introduced.Practical flight control technologies are reviewed,with an emphasis on discussing the corresponding engineering simulation programs.Finally,the difficulties of implementing advanced control technologies are addressed,and the future development of helicopter engineering simulators are highlighted.

Novel robust fault diagnosis method for flight control systems

A novel robust fault diagnosis scheme, which possesses fault estimate capability as well as fault diagnosis property, is proposed. The scheme is developed based on a suitable combination of the adaptive multiple model （AMM） and unknown input observer （UIO）. The main idea of the proposed scheme stems from the fact that the actuator Lock-in-Place fault is unknown （when and where the actuator gets locked are unknown）, and multiple models are used to describe different fault scenarios, then a bank of unknown input observers are designed to implement the disturbance de-coupling. According to Lyapunov theory, proof of the robustness of the newly developed scheme in the presence of faults and disturbances is derived. Numerical simulation results on an aircraft example show satisfactory performance of the proposed algorithm.

Nonlinear Intelligent Flight Control for Quadrotor Unmanned Helicopter

Quadrotor unmanned helicopter is a new popular research platform for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV),thanks to its simple construction,vertical take-off and landing(VTOL)capability.Here a nonlinear intelligent flight control system is developed for quadrotor unmanned helicopter,including trajectory control loop composed of co-controller and state estimator,and attitude control loop composed of brain emotional learning(BEL)intelligent controller.BEL intelligent controller based on mammalian middle brain is characterized as self-learning capability,model-free and robustness.Simulation results of a small quadrotor unmanned helicopter show that the BEL intelligent controller-based flight control system has faster dynamical responses with higher precision than the traditional controller-based system.

Flight Control System of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

To date unmanned aerial system(UAS)technologies have attracted more and more attention from countries in the world.Unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)play an important role in reconnaissance,surveillance,and target tracking within military and civil fields.Here one briefly introduces the development of UAVs,and reviews its various subsystems including autopilot,ground station,mission planning and management subsystem,navigation system and so on.Furthermore,an overview is provided for advanced design methods of UAVs control system,including the linear feedback control,adaptive and nonlinear control,and intelligent control techniques.Finally,the future of UAVs flight control techniques is forecasted.

Circular Formation Flight Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Directed Network and External Disturbance

This paper proposes a new distributed formation flight protocol for unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs)to perform coordinated circular tracking around a set of circles on a target sphere.Different from the previous results limited in bidirectional networks and disturbance-free motions,this paper handles the circular formation flight control problem with both directed network and spatiotemporal disturbance with the knowledge of its upper bound.Distinguishing from the design of a common Lyapunov fiunction for bidirectional cases,we separately design the control for the circular tracking subsystem and the formation keeping subsystem with the circular tracking error as input.Then the whole control system is regarded as a cascade connection of these two subsystems,which is proved to be stable by input-tostate stability(ISS)theory.For the purpose of encountering the external disturbance,the backstepping technology is introduced to design the control inputs of each UAV pointing to North and Down along the special sphere(say,the circular tracking control algorithm)with the help of the switching function.Meanwhile,the distributed linear consensus protocol integrated with anther switching anti-interference item is developed to construct the control input of each UAV pointing to east along the special sphere(say,the formation keeping control law)for formation keeping.The validity of the proposed control law is proved both in the rigorous theory and through numerical simulations.

Quadcopter UAV Modeling and Automatic Flight Control Design

The mathematical model of quadcopter-unmanned aerial vehicle （UAV） is derived by using two approaches： One is the Newton-Euler approach which is formulated using classical meehanics; and other is the Euler-Lagrange approach which describes the model in terms of kinetic （translational and rotational） and potential energy. The proposed quadcopter＇s non-linear model is incorporated with aero-dynamical forces generated by air resistance, which helps aircraft to exhibits more realistic behavior while hovering. Based on the obtained model, the suitable control strategy is developed, under which two effective flight control systems are developed. Each control system is created by cascading the proportional-derivative （PD） and T-S fuzzy controllers that are equipped with six and twelve feedback signals individually respectively to ensure better tracking, stabilization, and response. Both pro- posed flight control designs are then implemented with the quadcopter model respectively and multitudinous simulations are conducted using MATLAB/Simulink to analyze the tracking performance of the quadcopter model at various reference inputs and trajectories.

New robust fault-tolerant controller for self-repairing flight control systems

A new robust fault-tolerant controller scheme integrating a main controller and a compensator for the self-repairing flight control system is discussed.The main controller is designed for high performance of the original faultless system.The compensating controller can be seen as a standalone loop added to the system to compensate the effects of fault guaranteeing the stability of the system.A design method is proposed using nonlinear dynamic inverse control as the main controller and nonlinear extended state observer-based compensator.The stability of the whole closed-loop system is analyzed.Feasibility and validity of the new controller is demonstrated with an aircraft simulation example.

Interval Criterion of Robust Stability for Nonlinear System and Its Application to Flight Control

Robust stability for a series of nonlinear systems is presented in this paper. Through different region descriptions, the problem of stability for a complex nonlinear system is transformed into ones of the robust stabilities of several linear time-invariant systems. To get useful robust stability conditions, an expression for interval system is given, and the relationship between the internal stability and low- or supper-bound stability of interval systems is discussed. Thus, the polynomial matrix inequality for the determination of system robust stability is developed. Based on the equivalency transformation of the inequality, the solvable condition of the inequality is obtained. By means of the condition, robust stability theorem for interval systems is presented and a new design method of feedback control for nonlinear system is achieved. Applications to flight controller design show that the new method is efficient for uncertain system design.

ADAPTIVE FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM OF ARMED HELICOPTER USING WAVELET NEURAL NETWORK METHOD

A discussion is devoted to the design of an adaptive flight control system of the armed helicopter using wavelet neural network method. Firstly, the control loop of the attitude angle is designed with a dynamic inversion scheme in a quick loop and a slow loop. respectively. Then, in order to compensate the error caused by dynamic inversion, the adaptive flight control system of the armed helicopter using wavelet neural network method is put forward, so the BP wavelet neural network and the Lyapunov stable wavelet neural network are used to design the helicopter flight control system. Finally, the typical maneuver flight is simulated to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness. Result proves that the wavelet neural network has an engineering practical value and the effect of WNN is good.

A fault-tolerant control method for distributed flight control system facing wing damage

With the strong battlefield application environment of the next generation fighter,based on the design of distributed vehicle management system,a fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control(FTC)method for wing surface damage is proposed in this paper.Aiming at three kinds of wing damage modes,this paper proposes a diagnosis method based on the fault decision tree and forms a fault decision tree for wing damage from the aspects of sample database construction,feature parameter extraction,and fault decision tree construction.Based on the fault diagnosis results,the longitudinal control law based on dynamic inverse and the lateral-directional robust control laws based on linear quadratic regulator(LQR)are proposed.From the simulation examples,the fault diagnosis algorithm based on the decision tree can complete the judgment of three wing surface damage modes within 2 ms,and the FTC law can make the fighter quickly return to a stable flight state after a short transient of 1 s,which achieves the fault-tolerant goal.

DESIGNING REDUCED-ORDER CONTROLLERS OF MIXEDSENSITIVITY PROBLEM FOR FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEMS

Based on linear matrix inequalities (LMI), the design method of reduced order controllers of mixed sensitivity problem is studied for flight control systems. It is shown that there exists a controller with order not greater than the difference between the generalized plant order and the number of independent control variables, if the mixed sensitivity problem is solvable for strict regular flight control plants. The proof is constructive, and an approach to design such a controller can be obtained in terms of a pair of feasible solution to the well known 3 LMI. Finally, an example of mixed sensitivity problem for a flight control system is given to demonstrate practice of the approach.

Robust Near-Hovering Flight Controller for Model-Scale Helicopters Via Parametric Approach

This paper aims to provide a parametric design for robust flight controller of the model-scale helicopter. The main contributions lie in two aspects. Firstly,under near-hovering condition,a procedure is presented for simplification of the highly nonlinear and under-actuated model of the model-scale helicopter. This nonlinear system is linearized around the trim values of the chosen flight mode,followed by decomposing this high-order linear model into three lower-order subsystems according to the coupling properties among channels.After decomposition,the three subsystems are obtained which include the coupling subsystem between the roll( pitch) motion and the lateral( longitudinal) motion,the subsystem of the yaw motion and the subsystem of the vertical motion. Secondly,by using eigenstructure assignment,the problem of flight controller design can be converted into solving two optimization problems and the linear robust controllers of these subsystems are designed through solving these optimization problems. Besides, this paper contrasts and analyzed the performances of the LQR controller and the parametric controller. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and the robustness against the parametric perturbations of the parametric controller.

New Stability Condition of T-S Fuzzy Systems and Design of Robust Flight Control Principle

Unlike the previous research works analyzing the stability of the T-S （Takagi-Sugeno） fuzzy model, an extension on the stability condition of T-S fuzzy systems with a different strategy is provided. In the strategy a new variable, which is relative to the grade of fuzzy membership function, is introduced to the stability analysis and a new stability conclusion is deduced. The definition of stability condition in this paper is different from previous works, though they are similar in form. With the proposed method, the simulation in flight control law shows a better effectiveness.

STUDIES ON AIRCRAFT TOTAL ENERGY FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM：NONLINEAR SYSTEM INTEGRATION AND SIMULATION

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A REVERSED-FRAME NORMALIZATION DESIGN OF ROBUST FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM

In this paper, a discussion is devoted to the theory and method of a reversed-frame normalization design to robust flight control system. The robust stability theory of the normal transfer function matrix with the same characteristic gain loci is proved. An example of flight control system design shows the application and advantage of this method.