Aircraft parameter estimation using output-error methods

Abstract

Certification requirements, optimization and minimum project costs, design of flight control laws and the implementation of flight simulators are among the principal applications of inverse problem applications in the aeronautical industry. The problem of aircraft identification and parameter estimation demands for accurate mathematical model of the aerodynamics and adequate experimental flight data gathering and processing. The aircraft dynamic modeling is characterized by aerodynamic and control derivatives whose values can be directly determined from flight test data. This work describes the application of the output-error method using the Nelder–Mead (NM) and Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithms to obtain the aerodynamic and control derivatives of a regional jet aircraft. Unlike others identification methods based on equation-error the output-error method gives unbiased parameter estimation in the presence of measurement noise. In this work, experimental results for estimation of the lateral directional aerodynamic derivatives, using flight test data provided by EMBRAER, are presented.