A New Nonlinear Control Design Strategy for Fixed Wing Aircrafts Piloting

This paper proposes a novel nonlinear feedback control strategy for velocity and attitude control of fixed wing aircrafts. The key feature of the control design strategy is the introduction of a virtual control input in order to deal with the underactuation property of such vehicles and to indirectly control the orientation of the aircraft. As such, the proposed strategy consists of three control loops each realizing a specific task. Simulations are carried out by using the jetstream-3102 aircraft in a real-time virtual Simulation Platform for the development of Aircraft Control Systems (SP-ACS). The proposed approach of control is model-based for which we have introduces an identification part before test and validation. We use the Total Least Squares Estimation (TLSE) technique to identify the aerodynamic parameters, which are unknown, variable and classified. Each aerodynamic coefficient is defined as the mean of its numerical values. All other variations are considered as modeling uncertainties that will be compensated by the robustness of the piloting law. Simulation results on Jetstream-3102 aircraft show very good performance in terms of convergence towards the desired reference trajectories and in terms of robustness with respect to modeling uncertainties.