An Alternative Tuning Scheme for Simple Adaptive Flight Control System

Abstract

Abstract The occurrence of system failure or of external disturbances are problem that must be considered in the design of safe flight control systems. Adaptive control schemes show the ability to handle such issues without any a priori knowledge about the fault or disturbance. The main condition for obtaining a stable adaptive controller is the passivity of the plant but most real system do not satisfy this condition. The use of properly defined Parallel Feedforward Compensator (PFC) can allow the augmented system to meet the passivity requirements. An alternative design approach for tuning the PFC and the invariant gains of the Simple Adaptive Controller (SAC) is presented in this work. The tuning procedures is a modification of the PSO and is called Population Decline Swarm Optimization (PDSO) since it takes into account a decline demographic model to speed up the tuning steps. The method is applied to adaptively control the pitch response of an aeroplane during level flight. Tuning results are presented along with flight mechanics simulation taking into account different command laws.