Nonlinear adaptive flight control system: Performance enhancement and validation

The problem of decreasing stability margins in L₁ adaptive control systems is discussed and an out-of-loop L₁ adaptive control scheme based on Lyapunov’s stability theorem is proposed. This scheme enhances the effectiveness of the adaptation, which ensures that the system has sufficient stability margins to achieve the desired performance under parametric uncertainty, additional delays, and actuator faults. The stability of the developed control system is demonstrated through a series of simulations. Compared with an existing control scheme, the constant adjustment of the stability margins by the proposed adaptive scheme allows their range to be extended by a factor of 4–5, bringing the stability margin close to that of variable gain PD control with adaptively scheduled gains. The engineered practicability of adaptive technology is verified. A series of flight tests verify the practicability of the designed adaptive technology. The results of these tests demonstrate the enhanced performance of the proposed control scheme with nonlinear parameter estimations under insufficient stability margins and validate its robustness in the event of actuator failures.