Flight control: Challenges and opportunities

The development of flight control is facing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. According to the new demands and new technological features of future flight vehicles, the opportunities and challenges of flight control are analyzed from the following five aspects: 1) new characteristics of flight vehicles; 2) information-oriented environment; 3) autonomous of unmanned systems; 4) high-reliable reconfigurable fault-tolerant systems; 5) assessment and validation of flight control systems. To exploit the opportunities and meet the challenges, the following five research aspects should be strengthened: 1) new concepts, theories and methods with respect to new characteristics of flight vehicles; 2) information-oriented integration of control, computing and communication, and integration of control, decision-making and management; 3) high level autonomous unmanned systems; 4) high-reliable and reconfigurable fault-tolerant flight control system; 5) high-efficient, high-reliable assessment and validation on flight control systems.