Augmenting L1 Adaptive Control of Piecewise Constant Type to a Fighter Aircraft. Performance and Robustness Evaluation for Rapid Maneuvering

An L1 adaptive controller of piecewise constant type has been applied to a fighter aircraft by augmenting it to a linear state-feedback controller. Angle of attack and sideslip as well as velocity vector roll rate is demanded and controlled. It is relatively easy to design a controller augmentation this way; few parameters need to be tuned. To design an L1-controller for roll/pitch/yaw-motion of an aircraft, a five-state reference system with desired dynamics is created and three bandwidths of low-pass filters are chosen. The L1-controller activates when the aircraft aided by the feedback controller deviates from the reference dynamics. Load disturbance rejection is improved when the L1-controller is active. Results from simulations with different kinds of deviations from the nominal aircraft are presented. Special non-linear design elements need to be introduced if actuator dynamics, including rate limits, interfere with reference system dynamics. Since an L1 adaptive controller of piecewise constant type in its original form is linear time invariant, frequency domain analysis is presented, including comparisons to a typical linear state-feedback controller.