Adaptive Control in Flying Vehicles

Researchers: Anders Pettersson, Rolf Johansson, Anders Robertsson, Karl Johan Åström

The goal of this project is to address the question whether adaptive control can be used in products that SAAB are developing today or in the future.

There are two fundamentally different ways of controlling systems with dynamics that change over time: adaptive or robust control. The industrial baseline for flying applications today is to use robust control, which caters for the effect of parametric uncertainties, but this baseline comes with an associated loss of performance. On the other hand, with an adaptive controller it is possible to boost the performance of the closed-loop system, but then the inherent robustness may be insufficient.

Questions to be addressed:

Can better performance be achieved for a fully/partly adaptive controller compared to a robust controller, especially with uncertain dynamics in the plant and its subsystems?

When in product development cycle, can adaptive steering be used? In what applications can adaptive techniques be used? Subsystems such as actuators perhaps, as well as at the top level?

For the use of adaptive control in these systems, aspects such as product safety, control law clearance and certification should be taken into account.

Publications

Anders Pettersson, Karl Johan Åström, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Nonlinear Feedforward and Reference Systems for Adaptive Flight Control". In 2013 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, Boston, MA, United States, August 2013.

Anders Pettersson: "Augmenting L1 Adaptive Control of Piecewise Constant Type to Aerial Vehicles". Licentiate Thesis Department of Automatic Control, Lund University, Sweden, April 2013.

Anders Pettersson, Karl Johan Åström, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Augmenting L1 Adaptive Control of Piecewise Constant Type to a Fighter Aircraft. Performance and Robustness Evaluation for Rapid Maneuvering". In 2012 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference, August 2012.

Anders Pettersson, Karl Johan Åström, Anders Robertsson, Rolf Johansson: "Analysis of Linear L1 Adaptive Control Architectures for Aerospace Applications". In 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2012, Maui, Hawaii, United States, December 2012.

2019-01-11