During the summer of 1996 a series of¯ight tests demonstrated a new indirect-adaptive approach to recon-®gurable¯ight control known as the self-designing controller (SDC). The SDC achieves improved, appropriately decoupled responses during arbitrary effector or airframe impairment scenarios, and successful SDC¯ight tests culminated with smooth landing of the VISTA/F-16 in crosswind conditions with a (simulated) missing primary control surface (left horizontal tail). The SDC couples modelfollowing receding-horizon optimal control with an on-line parameter identi®cation (ID) algorithm designed to provide smooth, accurate estimates of possibly time-varying system parameters, even under conditions of low excitation. The adaptive model-following approach is designed to reduce control law development costs and improve system performance in the presence of gradual or abrupt changes, including unforeseen events. This paper provides (1) a brief summary of the SDC algorithms, (2) a discussion of SDC implementation on the VISTA/F-16¯ight control hardware, (3) a summary of¯ight test results, and (4) suggestions for further research in recon®gurable/adaptive controls. This work has been supported

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A reduced-computation end-game (RCEG) steering law is derived for predictive guidance and simulated for a class of command guided weapons. The RCEG law considers maneuver control system response dynamics and variable axial and normal accelerations. It substantially reduces the guidance computational burden, while achieving accuracy comparable to that realizable with iterative predictive guidance (IPG). With IPG, each iteration requires numerical integration of vehicle equations of motion to predict the miss distance, whereas the RCEG law is noniterative and requires no integration. RCEG guidance uses closed-form miss distance estimates based upon lumped-parameter rotational and translational dynamics. Results of a six-degree-of-freedom simulation of a hypersonic intercept weapon system indicate that the RCEG law, compared with a representative form of IPG, has miss distances that are statistically similar to those of IPG but a computational burden smaller by a factor of approximately 36.