Modeling and Model Reference Adaptive Control of Aircraft with Asymmetric Damage

This paper addresses some fundamental issues in adaptive control of aircraft with struc- tural damage. It presents a thorough study of linearized aircraft models with damage to obtain new details of system descriptions, such as coupling and partial derivatives of lateral and longitudinal dynamics. A detailed study of system invariance under damage conditions is performed for generic aircraft models to obtain key system characterizations for model reference adaptive control (MRAC), such as infinite zero structure and signs of high frequency gain matrices. A comprehensive study of multivariable MRAC systems in the presence of damage is performed to obtain critical design specifications for adaptive flight control, such as system and controller parametrizations and adaptive parameter up- date laws. Both analytical and simulation results are given to illustrate the design and performance of adaptive control systems for aircraft flight control. Adaptive control of aircraft in the presence of damage has been an important topic in the research of flight control design for aircraft safety. Damage can cause uncertain parametric and structural variations, which requires new aircraft modeling and control approaches. In Reference (1), a study of aircraft dynamics with damage is presented, and a neural network based adaptive control algorithm is introduced for control of aircraft in the presence of structure uncertainties. In (2), equations of motion are introduced in detail for aircraft with asymmetric mass loss. In (3), we introduced a nonlinear aircraft model with partial wing damage, and illustrated linearization of such a model. In (4), real time identification of a damaged aircraft model is studied. A two-step identification process is introduced, which consists of an aircraft state estimation phase and an aerodynamic model identification step. With such a two-step process, the nonlinear part of the model identification is isolated in the first phase, and the aerodynamic parameter identification procedure is simplified to a linear one. A hybrid adaptive control method is proposed in (5) for control of aircraft with damage. The control design is based on a neural network parameter estimation blended with a direct adaptive law. A stability and convergence analysis is presented for this adaptive control methodology. For accommodating unknown changes in the structure and parameters, multivariable MRAC designs offer many advantages. In (6), we introduced an MRAC design based on the LDS decomposition of the high frequency gain matrix for the control of aircraft with multiple wing damage. The key design conditions are that, both the nominal and post-damage systems should have a uniform known modified interactor matrix, and the leading principal minors of their high frequency gain matrices should be nonzero with their signs unchanged. In (7), we studied linearization of nonlinear aircraft models under damage conditions and designed a multivariable MRAC scheme which does not require the knowledge of the signs of the high frequency gain matrix. Potential extension to aircraft flight control systems with changing signs of the high frequency gain matrix remains a topic of future research.