Robust Gain-Scheduled Flight Controller via A New Formulation for Over-Bounding Scheduling Parameter Errors

Conservatism reduction for linear parameter‐varying control design facing inexact scheduling parameters illustrated on flight tests

“…The problem setup is the same as in conference article 17 and our previous report, 6 thus we give a simplified description on it.…”

“…MuPAL‐α has been developed as an in‐flight simulator, 28 which has an ability to mimic other aircraft dynamics in flight, and thus model‐matching to a predefined handling characteristics and disturbance suppression are imposed as controller design specifications in References 6,17. The same design specifications are adopted in this article.…”

“…The new overbounding theoretically introduces no conservatism with the reverse use of Elimination lemma 13‐15 . Our supposed LPV systems in this article are slightly relaxed from parametrically affine LPV systems 16,17 to parametrically multiaffine LPV systems 18‐20 without introducing huge numerical complexity in the design process. As a practical application of our method, we design discrete‐time LPV flight controllers for the lateral‐directional motions of a research airplane MuPAL‐α in the same problem setup adopted in Reference 6, and confirm that our method produces better LPV controllers than the method in Reference 6 w.r.t.…”

“…(The detailed information is given later on.) Furthermore, the control performance is examined in practical environment, that is, in flight tests, which has not been presented in our conference articles 16,17 . To enhance theoretical contributions of this article, we address the design problem in both continuous‐time and discrete‐time cases.…”