Flight Controller Design of Transport Airdrop

Abstract

During airdrop of heavy load, the flight parameters vary continuously as the load moves in the hold, and change suddenly when the load drops out. This process deteriorates the flight quality and control characteristic as the load becomes heavier. Based on the simplified airdrop flight equations, the backstepping and switch control methods are developed to tackle the flight state holding and disturbance/uncertainty (such as large-scale flight condition, pilot manipulation error, system measure delay, etc.) attenuation problem in this paper. Moreover, these methods can be used as a reference for pilot manipulating during airdrop. With the backstepping theory, an adaptive controller is synthesized for the purpose of stabilizing the transport when the load moves in the hold, and then a coordinated switch control method is used to control the aircraft when the condition jumps from the existence of load at the rear of fuselage to no load in the fuselage. Simulation results show that the proposed controllers not only provide effective state holding during airdrop, but also achieve robust performance within wide flight conditions.