Leap-Ahead Control Theoretic Applications

Significant resources are required for the design, development, implementation, and testing of modern flight control systems. Large amounts of time and money must be spent in the acquisition and analysis of wind tunnel and analytical data to ensure the precision tuning of flight control laws over the large flight envelope of a modern aircraft. Additionally, when the vehicle condition changes due to common deviations such as payload changes, system upgrades, and degradation or failure of actuation systems over the life of the aircraft, further testing and analysis must be conducted to maintain the high fidelity of the model and retuning of the control system. The practical application of robust adaptive control strategies to these flight control systems can significantly reduce the costs and risks associated with their development and maintenance. With the utilization of adaptive, robust, and fault tolerant control algorithms, required fidelity of original modeling data, re-study of the algorithm due to configuration change, and risk to the aircraft under tolerable system failures can all be significantly reduced. This should lead to dramatic reduction in the cost and risk associated with the development and validation of future flight control systems. With this in mind, the NextGen team plans to develop a high-level adaptive control framework, allowing seamless implementation of existing Flight Control Systems (FCS) capable of meeting these goals and, in Phase I, verify its expected benefits through a series of simulations and hardware tests.