Evolutionary Design Of Robust Flight Control For A Hypersonic Aircraft

The research during the third reporting period focused on fixed order robust control design for hypersonic vehicles. A new technique was developed to synthesize fixed order H(sub infinity) controllers. A controller canonical form is imposed on the compensator structure and a homotopy algorithm is employed to perform the controller design. Various reduced order controllers are designed for a simplified version of the hypersonic vehicle model used in our previous studies to demonstrate the capabilities of the code. However, further work is needed to investigate the issue of numerical ill-conditioning for large order systems and to make the numerical approach more reliable. Calise, A. J. Unspecified Center NAG1-1451...

Advanced Control of Aircraft, Spacecraft and Rockets introduces the reader to the concepts of modern control theory applied to the design and analysis of general flight control systems in a concise and mathematically rigorous style. It presents a comprehensive treatment of both atmospheric and space flight control systems including aircraft, rockets (missiles and launch vehicles), entry vehicles and spacecraft (both orbital and attitude control). The broad coverage of topics emphasizes the synergies among the various flight control systems and attempts to show their evolution from the same set of physical principles as well as their design and analysis by similar mathematical tools. In addition, this book presents state-of-art control system design methods - including multivariable, optimal, robust, digital and nonlinear strategies - as applied to modern flight control systems. Advanced Control of Aircraft, Spacecraft and Rockets features worked examples and problems at the end of each chapter as well as a number of MATLAB / Simulink examples housed on an accompanying website at http://home.iitk.ac.in/~ashtew that are realistic and representative of the state-of-the-art in flight control.

This thesis develops a new nonlinear robust control design procedure which addresses some of the challenges associated with the control of uncertain nonlinear system and applies the proposed method to tracking control of an Air-breathing Hypersonic Flight Vehicle (AHFV). The AHFV is a highly nonlinear system and the combination of nonlinear dynamics, parameter uncertainty and complex constraints make the flight control design a challenging task for this type of vehicle. The main contribution of this thesis lies in the fact that it presents a robust feedback linerization based strategy which solves the control issue of a class of nonlinear systems subject to parametric uncertainty. The method is effectively applied to the tracking control of an AHFV. It is also demonstrated that the proposed approach can be used to design a single robust controller for a large flight envelope rather than using several gain scheduled controllers. This research, firstly presents three different approaches to develop linearized uncertainty models for a class of nonlinear systems using a robust feedback lnearization method. The feedback linearization approach to linearize the nonlinear dynamics has some advantages over the point linearization (Jacobian linearization) method. However, the feedback linearization method only linearizes the nominal model of a system and in the presence of uncertainty in the model the exact linearization is not possible. In this thesis, we present a robust approach to deal with the nonlinearities arising from the uncertainties in the system and use a nonlinear AHFV model to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. Besides parametric uncertainty, due to the presence of body-integrated propulsion system, and the flexible modes, the nonlinear model of AHFV does not possess full relative degree. Any attempt to feedback linearize this nonlinear model will result into having input term in low order derivatives of the system output. In this research, we strategically remove the coupling and flexible effects from the nonlinear model and simplify the model in such a way that the full relative degree condition is satisfied. In the development of linearized uncertainty model for an AHFV the conventional feedback linearization approach is used to remove the known nonlinearities from the simplified system model and the nonlinearities arising from the uncertainties are treated in three different ways. In the first method, nonlinear uncertainties are linearized using Taylor expansion at an arbitrary point by considering a structured representation of uncertainties. This lienarization approach approximates the actual nonlinear uncertainty by considering only the first order terms and neglecting all the higher order terms. For the linearized model, a minimax Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) controller combined with feedback linearization law is proposed to fulfill the velocity and altitude tracking requirements of an AHFV. In the second method, an unstructured uncertainty representation is considered and a minimax Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller combined with feedback linearization law is proposed for the same tracking requirements. In the third, method the nonlinear uncertainty terms are linearized at an arbitrary point using the generalized mean value theorem. The main advantages of using this approach are that upper bound on the uncertainties can be obtained by both structured and unstructured uncertainty representations and there is no need to ignore higher order uncertainty terms. The uncertain linearized models obtained from this method are followed by guaranteed cost and minimax LQR controllers combined with feedback linearization law. Rigorous simulations using actual nonlinear model for all the above methods are presented in the thesis to analyze the effectiveness of these controllers. These simulations have considered several cases of uncertainties for a step change in the reference commands. In order to see the robustness properties of the proposed robust scheme a Monte-Calro based simulation is also presented by considering the given bound on the uncertain parameters. Also, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach for a large flight envelope, several simulations are performed to observe the tracking response for the given reference trajectories in a large flight envelope.

In the past two decades, there has been a renewed and sustained effort devoted to modeling the dynamics of air-breathing hypersonic vehicles, for both simulation and control design purposes. The highly nonlinear characteristics of flight dynamics in hypersonic regimes and the consequent significance variability of the response with the operating conditions requires the development of innovative flight control solutions, hence the development of suitable model of the vehicle dynamics that are amenable to design, validation and rapid calibration of control algorithms. In this dissertation, a control-oriented and a simulation model of a generic hypersonic vehicle were derived to support the design and calibration of model-based flight controllers. A nonlinear robust adaptive controller was developed on the basis of the control-oriented model, that was shown to provide stable trajectory tracking in higher fidelity computer simulations. The first stage of this research was the development of a control design model (CDM) for the 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics of an air-breathing hypersonic aircraft based on an available high-fidelity first principle model. A method that incorporates the theory of compressible fluid dynamics and system identification methods, was proposed and implemented. The development of the CDM is based on curve fit approximation of the forces and moments acting on the vehicle, making the model suitable for control design. Kriging and Least Squares methods were used to find the most appropriate curve-fitted model of the aerodynamic forces for both the control design and the control simulation models. It was shown that the 6-DOF model can be both categorized as an under-actuated mechanical system, as well as an over-actuated system with respect to a chosen in- put/output pair of interest. An important contribution of this work is the development of a nonlinear adaptive controller for the 6-DOF control design model. The controller was endowed with a modular structure, comprised of an adaptive inner-loop attitude controller and a robust nonlinear outer-loop controller of fixed structure. The purpose of the outer- loop controller is to avoid the typical complexity of solutions derived from adaptive backstepping methods. A noticeable feature of the outer-loop controller is the presence of an internal model unit that generates the reference for the angle-of-attack, in spite of parametric model uncertainty. Airspeed, lateral velocity, vehicle's heading and altitude were considered as regulated outputs of the system. Simulation results on the control simulation model show the effectiveness of the developed controller in spite of significant variation in the flight parameters.

This book studies selected discrete-time flight control schemes for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems in the presence of system uncertainties, external disturbances and input saturation. The main contributions of this book for UAV systems are as follows: (i) the proposed integer-order discrete-time control schemes are based on the designed discrete-time disturbance observers (DTDOs) and the neural network (NN); and (ii) the fractional-order discrete-time control schemes are developed by using the fractional-order calculus theory, the NN and the DTDOs. The book offers readers a good understanding of how to establish discrete-time tracking control schemes for fixed-wing UAV systems subject to system uncertainties, external wind disturbances and input saturation. It represents a valuable reference guide for academic research on uncertain UAV systems, and can also support advanced / Ph.D. studies on control theory and engineering.

Abstract: This thesis presents the design of two nonlinear robust controllers for an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle model. To overcome the analytical intractability of a dynamical model derived from first principles, a simplified control-oriented model is used for control design. The control-oriented model retains most of the features of the original model, including non-minimum phase characteristic of the flight-path angle dynamics and strong couplings between the engine and flight dynamics, whereas flexibility effects, included in the simulation model, are regarded as a dynamic perturbation. In adopting reduced-complexity models for controller design, the issue of robustness with respect to model uncertainty must be carefully addressed and included at the design level. Dynamic inversion-based design methods do not lend themselves easily to quantitative robustness analysis, due to the complexity of the inverse model of the plant. In this work, a nonlinear sequential loop-closure approach is adopted to design two different dynamic state-feedback controllers that provide stable tracking of velocity and altitude reference trajectories. The approach considered utilizes a combination of adaptive and robust design methods based on both classical and recently developed nonlinear design tools. Simulation results indicate that the proposed methodology may constitute a feasible approach towards the development of robust nonlinear controllers that satisfactorily address the issue of model uncertainty for this type of application.