Robust Adaptive Design for Aerial Vehicles with State-Limiting Constraints

Abstract

This paper presents robust adaptive augmentation design for a class of second-order uncertain nonlinear cascaded systems. These dynamics generalize the models that are often used for the design of inner-loop flight controllers for aerial vehicles. The proposed control architecture augments a baseline dynamic inversion controller with a direct adaptive component and a state-limiting component. While the adaptive augmentation is designed to maintain tracking performance in the presence of the system uncertainties, the state-limiting component protects the system trajectories from leaving an allowable subset in the system state space. The proposed design is applied to construct angle-of-attack command-tracking system for short-period dynamics of a fixed-wing aircraft, with simulation results presented.