Safety Assurance of Non-Deterministic Flight Controllers in Aircraft Applications

<p>Loss of control is a serious problem in aviation that primarily affects General Aviation. Technological advancements can help mitigate the problem, but the FAA certification process makes certain solutions economically unfeasible. This investigation presents the design of a generic adaptive autopilot that could potentially lead to a single certification for use in several makes and models of aircraft. The autopilot consists of a conventional controller connected in series with a robust direct adaptive model reference controller. In this architecture, the conventional controller is tuned once to provide outer-loop guidance and navigation to a reference model. The adaptive controller makes unknown aircraft behave like the reference model, allowing the conventional controller to successfully provide navigation without the need for retuning.</p> <p>A strong theoretical foundation is presented as an argument for the safety and stability of the controller. The stability proof of direct adaptive controllers require that the plant being controlled has no unstable transmission zeros and has a nonzero high frequency gain. Because most conventional aircraft do not readily meet these requirements, a process known as sensor blending was used. Sensor blending consists of using a linear combination of the plant’s outputs that has no unstable transmission zeros and has a nonzero high frequency gain to drive the adaptive controller. Although this method does not present a problem for regulators, it can lead to a steady state error in tracking applications. The sensor blending theory was expanded to take advantage of the system’s dynamics to allow for zero steady state error tracking. This method does not need knowledge of the specific system’s dynamics, but instead uses the structure of the A and B matrices to perform the blending for the general case.</p> <p>The generic adaptive autopilot was tested in two high-fidelity nonlinear simulators of two typical General Aviation aircraft. The results show that the autopilot was able to adapt appropriately to the different aircraft and was able to perform three-dimensional navigation and an ILS approach, without any modification to the controller. The autopilot was tested in moderate atmospheric turbulence, using consumer-grade sensors and actuators currently available in General Aviation aircraft. The generic adaptive autopilot was shown to be robust to atmospheric turbulence and sensor and actuator random noise. In both aircraft simulators, the autopilot adapted successfully to changes in airspeed, altitude, and configuration.</p> <p>This investigation proves the feasibility of a generic autopilot using direct adaptive controller. The autopilot does not need <em>a priori </em>information of the specific aircraft’s dynamics to maintain its safety and stability arguments. Real-time parameter estimation of the aircraft dynamics are not needed. Recommendations for future work are provided.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy in Aerospace Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation - Open Access

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Aerospace Engineering

Year

2016

Author dc:creator

• Noriega, Alfonso

• safety
• flight controllers
• Aviation
• Aviation Safety and Security

Repository record dc:identifier

https://commons.erau.edu/edt/288

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:commons.erau.edu:edt-1287