An adaptive control technology for flight safety in the presence of actuator anomalies and damage

The challenge of achieving safe flight comes into sharp focus in the face of adverse conditions caused by faults, damage, or upsets. When these situations occur, the corresponding uncertainties directly affect the safe operation of the aircraft. A technology that has the potential for enabling a safe flight under these adverse conditions is adaptive control. One of the main features of an adaptive control architecture is its ability to react to changing characteristics of the underlying aircraft dynamics. This thesis proposes the building blocks of an adaptable and reconfigurable control technology that ensures safe flight under adverse flight conditions. This technology enables the synthesis of such controllers as well as the systematic evaluation of their robustness characteristics. The field of adaptive control is a mature theoretical discipline that has evolved over the past thirty years, embodying methodologies for controlling uncertain dynamic systems with parametric uncertainties [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Through the efforts of various researchers over this period, systematic methods for the control of linear and nonlinear dynamic systems with parametric and dynamic uncertainties have been developed [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Stability and robustness properties of these systems in the presence of disturbances, time-varying parameters, unmodeled dynamics, time-delays, and various nonlinearities, have been outlined in the references [4]-[13] as well as in several journal and conference papers over the same period.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Matsutani, Megumi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Anuradha Annaswamy.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/57692

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/57692