Research of compound controller for flight simulator with disturbance observer

A compound controller is proposed to alleviate the considerable chattering in output of zero phase error tracking controller (ZPETC), when the flight simulator losses command data of simulation signal. Besides, the shortcomings, caused by conventional differential methods in retrieving velocity and acceleration signals, are avoided to a certain extent. The compound controller based on disturbance observer (DOB) is composed of a feed-forward controller and a feedback controller. It estimates velocity and acceleration of unknown tracking signal, and also velocity response with an approximate method for differential. The experiments on a single-axis flight simulator show that the proposed method has strong robustness against parameter perturbations and external disturbances, owing to the introduced DOB. Compared with the scheme with ZPETC, the proposed scheme possesses more simple design and better tracking performance. Moreover, it is less sensitive to position command distortion of flight simulator.