Adaptive Control of Nonaffine Systems for Flight Applications

Due to the nonlinear-in-control nature of the dynamical system in aggressive flight maneuvers, well-known dynamic inversion methods cannot be applied to determine the explicit form of the control law. Additionally, the aerodynamic uncertainties, typical for such regimes, are poorly modeled, and therefore there is a great need for adaptive control methods to compensate for dynamic instabilities. In this book, an adaptive control design method for both short-period and lateral/directional control of a fighter aircraft is presented. The approach uses a specialized set of radial basis function approximators and Lyapunov-based adaptive laws to estimate the unknown nonlinearities. The adaptive controller is defined as a solution of fast dynamics, which verifies the assumptions of Tikhonov's theorem from singular perturbations theory. Simulations illustrate the theoretical findings.