Flight Test of Model-Matching Controllers for Lateral/Directional Motions of In-Flight Simulator MuPAL-.ALPHA.

Abstract

In this paper, flight controller design for the lateral/direction motions of in-flight simulator MuPAL-α is discussed. For the simultaneous simulation of gust responses and pilot input responses of model aircraft, feedback and feedforward controllers are designed in two steps; feedback controllers for robust model-matching problem are first designed using scaled H∞ control to simulate the gust responses of target aircraft, and then feedforward controllers for H∞ model-matching are designed as right inverse systems to simulate the aircraft responses driven by pilot inputs. In the feedback controller design, we use airspeed in stead of inertial speed which was used in our previous report. After confirming that designed controllers have good model-matching performance with numerical simulations, we conducted hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight tests. In the flight tests, we confirmed that controllers with air speed feedback have better model-matching performance than controllers with inertial speed feedback, i.e. we have improved the model-matching performance of in-flight simulator MuPAL-α for its lateral/directional motions.