Koethe, Alexander (Technische Universitaet Berlin), Luckner, Robert (Berlin Technical University)

Outer-Loop Control Law Design with Control Allocation for a Multibody Aircraft

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "Aircraft flight control analysis and design 2" (ThM1), Thursday, April 4, 2019, 11:00−11:30, Carassa-Dadda

5th CEAS Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control, April 3-5, 2019, Milano, Italy

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 23, 2024

Abstract

In recent years, unmanned aircraft used as High-Altitude Platform Systems have been studied in research and industry as alternative technologies to satellites. Regarding actual operation and flight performance of such systems, multibody aircraft seem to be a promising aircraft configuration. In terms of flight dynamics, this aircraft strongly differs from classical rigid-body and flexible aircraft, because a strong interference between flight mechanic and formation modes occurs. A separation is carried out with an inner-loop flight control law. The inner loop transforms the multibody aircraft to a conventional aircraft in terms of flight dynamics, however, particular characteristics exist, like flying withairspeed close to stall and the large wingspan,which have to be considered in the outer-loop flight control law design. In addition, the multibody aircraft is an over-actuated system. This paper describes the outer loop flight control law design for flight path tracking of a multibody aircraft with control allocation. The presented method can be adopted to any other high-aspect ratio aircraft with similar dynamics.