National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) researchers have conducted a series of flight experiments designed to study the effects of varying levels of adaptive controller complexity on the performance and handling qualities of an aircraft under various simulated failure or damage conditions. A baseline, nonlinear dynamic inversion controller was augmented with three variations of a model reference adaptive control design. The simplest design consisted of a single adaptive parameter in each of the pitch and roll axes computed using a basic gradient-based update law. A second design was built upon the first by increasing the complexity of the update law. The third and most complex design added an additional adaptive parameter to each axis. Flight tests were conducted using NASA s Full-scale Advanced Systems Testbed, a highly modified F-18 aircraft that contains a research flight control system capable of housing advanced flight controls experiments. Each controller was evaluated against a suite of simulated failures and damage ranging from destabilization of the pitch and roll axes to significant coupling between the axes. Two pilots evaluated the three adaptive controllers as well as the non-adaptive baseline controller in a variety of dynamic maneuvers and precision flying tasks designed to uncover potential deficiencies in the handling qualities of the aircraft, and adverse interactions between the pilot and the adaptive controllers. The work was completed as part of the Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control Project under NASA s Aviation Safety Program.
Handling Qualities Evaluations of Low Complexity Model Reference Adaptive Controllers for Reduced Pitch and Roll Damping Scenarios
2011 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference
;
2011
;
Portland, OR, United States
2011 AIAA Modeling and Simulation Technologies Conference
;
2011
;
Portland, OR, United States
2011 AIAA Atmospheric Flight Mechanics Conference
;
2011
;
Portland, OR, United States
2011-07-18
Conference paper
No indication
English
British Library Conference Proceedings | 2011
|