Flight control using physical dynamic inversion

This paper presents a new architecture of dynamic inversion based flight control law, which decouples desired dynamics specification and stabilizing feedback controller design. The decoupling is achieved by using a physically integrated reference model, which mimics desired aircraft response, and an incrementally cascaded error controller, which shapes the extra dynamics beyond the desired dynamics. This approach makes best use of flight dynamics both in feed forward and feedback design, in an attempt to provide design transparency and to ease the feedback control efforts, and thus named Physical Dynamic Inversion here. Pilots commands are filtered out by the explicit reference model when getting close to the envelope boundaries, together with reducing feedback commands at the same time, flight envelope protection are completed. The novel features are demonstrated by comparison with the existing architectures in the literature in the aspects of desired dynamic specification, loop closure and ideal closed loop dynamics. Rules of gain tuning are also introduced, the benefits of auto gain scheduling of dynamic inversion based control law preserves, while providing satisfactory flying qualities.