23rd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 8-13 September, 2002, Toronto, Canada
Paper ICAS 2002-5.4.5

LATERAL FLIGHT CONTROL SYSTEM USING OPTIMAL H-INFINITY CONTROLLERS

A. Stoica
University "Politehnica" of Bucharest, Romania

Keywords: lateral autopilot, optimal h8 control problem, singular perturbations, well-conditioned computation.

The present paper describes a design method for the automatic flight control system of the lateral motion of the aircraft; this method is based on an optimal control technique which solution is obtained using the singular perturbations theory. In contrast with the suboptimal design, no ill-conditioned computations appear when a level of attenuation close to its minimal value is used. Moreover the optimal controller derived has a smaller order than the suboptimal one. The case study for the lateral flight control system of the VISTA F-16 aircraft illustrates the theoretical developments.

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