Gain-scheduled for aerial vehicle autopilot design using fixed-structure synthesis

A novel systematic technique for gain-scheduled control based on fixed-structure synthesis is adopted to design the aerial vehicle autopilot. The gain-scheduled design can be transformed into the multi-model control problem with both controller architecture and gain-scheduled architecture defined a priori. Hidden coupling terms naturally arise in the linearized dynamics of the gain-scheduled controller when some of the state variables are also used as scheduling variables. Unlike traditional approaches that do not consider these terms, the proposed method takes the hidden coupling terms directly into account in the synthesis phase. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.