Robust adaptive control for nonlinear aircraft system with uncertainties

Model reference adaptive control (MRAC) schemes are known as an effective method to deal with system uncertainties. High adaptive gains are usually needed in order to achieve fast adaptation. However, this leads to high-frequency oscillation in the control signal and may even make the system unstable. A robust adaptive control architecture was designed in this paper for nonlinear aircraft dynamics facing the challenges of input uncertainty, matched uncertainty, and unmatched uncertainty. By introducing a robust compensator to the MRAC framework, the high-frequency components in the control response were eliminated. The proposed control method was applied to the longitudinal-direction motion control of a nonlinear aircraft system. Flight simulation results demonstrated that the proposed robust adaptive method was able to achieve fast adaptation without high-frequency oscillations, and guaranteed transient performance.