Adaptive nonlinear flight control

Research under supervision of Dr. Calise and Dr. Prasad at the Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Aerospace Engineering. has demonstrated the applicability of an adaptive controller architecture. The architecture successfully combines model inversion control with adaptive neural network (NN) compensation to cancel the inversion error.; The tiltrotor aircraft provides a specifically interesting control design challenge. The tiltrotor aircraft is capable of converting from stable responsive fixed wing flight to unstable sluggish hover in helicopter configuration. It is desirable to provide the pilot with consistency in handling qualities through a conversion from fixed wing flight to hover.; The linear model inversion architecture was adapted by providing frequency separation in the command filter and the error-dynamics, while not exiting the actuator modes. This design of the architecture provides for a model following setup with guaranteed performance. This in turn allowed for convenient implementation of guaranteed handling qualities. A rigorous proof of boundedness is presented making use of compact sets and the LaSalle-Yoshizawa theorem. The analysis allows for the addition of the e-modification which guarantees boundedness of the NN weights in the absence of persistent excitation. The controller is demonstrated on the Generic Tiltrotor Simulator of Bell-Textron and NASA Ames R.C.; The model inversion implementation is robustified with respect to unmodeled input dynamics, by adding dynamic nonlinear damping. A proof of boundedness of signals in the system is included. The effectiveness of the robustification is also demonstrated on the XV-15 tiltrotor.; The SHL Perceptron NN provides a more powerful application, based on the universal approximation property of this type of NN. The SHL NN based architecture is also robustified with the dynamic nonlinear damping. A proof of boundedness extends the SHL NN augmentation with robustness to unmodeled actuator dynamics. The architecture is demonstrated on the XV-15 tiltrotor.