Adaptive Linear Parameter Varying Control for Aeroservoelastic Suppression

Adaptive control offers an opportunity to fulfill aircraft safety objectives though automated vehicle recovery while maintaining performance and stability requirements in the presence of unknown or varying operating environment. Future aircraft are a natural application of adaptive control. These aircraft will be more fuel efficient, have longer operating ranges though more flexible aircraft structures. This increased flexibility will tightly couple structural and rigid body modes. The traditional control approaches to address the aeroservoelastic (ASE) will not work due to this coupling. Furthermore, the application of adaptive control to these flexible aircraft may result in undesired ASE excitation leading to structural damage or failure. Hence an integrated flight control system is needed for gust load alleviation, flutter suppression and rigid body control of the aircraft which works in concert with the adaptive control system for improved resilience and safety. MUSYN proposes an integrated approach based on linear, parameter-varying (LPV) control to the design of integrated flight control algorithms. Phase II research is focused on developing a fully functional prototype tool suite to model, identify, analyze, design, simulate and implement in real-time, linear, parameter-varying (LPV) ASE controllers. The objective is to combine the integrated LPV flight control system with adaptive control to preserve rigid body performance during upsets while mitigating ASE effects. The prototype LPV tools will be used to analyze and design an inner-loop LPV ASE and adaptive outer-loop controller for the MAD-MUTT test vehicle. The LPV designs will be validated in software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing prior to their implementation and flight test on the MAD-MUTT vehicle. The objective is to demonstrate the viability of the LPV tools suite to analyze and synthesize integrated controllers for highly flexible aircraft. More »