Advanced nonlinear control: Robustness and stability with applications to aircraft flight control systems

This dissertation examines the problem of global decentralized control by output feedback for large-scale uncertain nonlinear systems whose subsystems are interconnected not only by their outputs but also by their unmeasurable states. Several innovative techniques will be developed to create decentralized output feedback controllers rendering the closed-loop systems globally asymptotically stable. This is accomplished by extending an output feedback domination design that requires only limited information about the nonlinear system. We will apply our design to lower, upper, and non-triangular nonlinear systems. A time-varying output feedback controller is also constructed for use with large-scale systems that have unknown parameters. Furthermore, a mixed large-scale system consisting of both lower and upper triangular systems is shown to be stabilizable by employing a combined high and low gain domination technique. The significance of our results is that we do not need to have prior information about the nonlinearities of the system. In addition, a new design technique was developed using homogeneous system theory, which allows for the design of nonsmooth controllers and observers to stabilize a class of feedforward system with uncontrollable and unobservable linearization.; An example of a large-scale system is a group of autonomous airships performing the function of a temporary mobile cell phone network. An airship mobile cell phone network is a novel solution to the problem of maintaining communication during the advent of extensive damage to the communication infrastructure; be it from a flood, earthquake, hurricane, or terrorist attack. A first principle force-based dynamic model for the Tri-Turbofan Airship was developed and will be discussed in detail. The mathematical model was based on actual flight test data that has been collected at the Gait Analysis and Innovative Technologies Laboratory. This model was developed to research autonomous airship operations using decentralized control techniques for large-scale systems.