Adaptive Control of a Morphing Aircraft through Updating the Number of Actuators

Abstract

An adaptive control scheme with control allocation through updating the number of operating actuators is proposed for a morphing aircraft which is called Innovative Control Effectors (ICE) aircraft. For the ICE morphing aircraft, there are hundreds of shapechange devices in an array on each wing. Different flight conditions correspond to different numbers of actuating devices to adapt to a changing mission environment. In this paper, firstly, the time-continuous morphing aircraft model is transformed into time-discrete model because of an uncertain quantization parameter in the model, and subsequently the adaptive flight control law is designed for the uncertain discrete time morphing aircraft model to track a desired reference model. Then the update rule of the number of actuators in control allocation module is derived in an implicit method. Finally, the simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of scheme proposed.