Tailless Aircraft Control Allocation.

Abstract

This paper presents a flight controller for a tail-less aircraft with a large suite of conventional and unconventional control effectors. The controller structure is modular to take advantages of individual technologies from the areas of plant parameter estimation, control allocation, and robust feedback control. Linear models generated off-line provide plant parameter estimates for control. Dynamic inversion control provides direct satisfaction of flying qualities requirements in the presence of uncertainties. The focus of this paper, however, is control allocation. Control allocation is posed as constrained parameter optimization to minimize an objective that is a function of the control surface deflections. The control law is decomposed into a sequence of prioritized partitions, and additional optimization variables scale the control partitions to provide optimal command limiting which prevent actuator saturation. Analysis shows that appropriate prioritization of dynamic inversion control laws provides graceful command and loop response degradation for unachievable commands. Preliminary simulation results show that command variable response remains decoupled for unachievable commands while other command limiting methods may result in unacceptable coupled response.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1997
Accession Number
ADA327799

Entities

People

  • James M. Buffington

Organizations

  • Wright Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircraft Models
  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Algorithms
  • Closed Loop Systems
  • Control Surfaces
  • Control Systems
  • Equations
  • Feedback
  • Fighter Aircraft
  • Flight
  • Flight Control Systems
  • Linear Programming
  • Models
  • Simulations
  • Tailless Aircraft

Readers

  • Operations Research
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Strategic Security Studies