Modeling and adaptive control of air vehicles with partial nonlinear parametrization

This paper studies the control of a generic longitudinal air vehicle dynamic model during the cruise phase with nonlinearly parametrized uncertain aerodynamic functions. Verified by the improved coefficient precision of the aerodynamic forces and moments, using a curve fitting technique on available flight data, it is demonstrated that a nonlinearly parametrized model can more accurately capture the vehicle dynamics than a linearly parametrized model. For control design, the air vehicle model is decomposed into a flight-path angle subsystem with rotational dynamics and a speed subsystem with engine actuation dynamics. An adaptive control scheme is developed using the combination of a function bounding technique and a modified backstepping control method for two interconnected subsystems. The designed adaptive control laws ensure both global stabilization and adaptive non-zero equilibrium point regulation of the closed-loop control system. A thorough simulation study is presented to show the effectiveness of the developed adaptive control scheme for a nonlinearly parametrized air vehicle system model.