Sliding mode control of F-16 longitudinal dynamics

Abstract

We consider the application of a conditional integrator based sliding mode control design for robust regulation of minimum-phase nonlinear systems to the control of the longitudinal flight dynamics of an F-16 aircraft. The design exploits the modal decomposition of the linearized dynamics into its short-period and phugoid approximations. The control design is based on linearization, but is implemented on the nonlinear multiple-input multiple-output longitudinal model of the F-16 aircraft. We consider model following for the angle-ofattack, with the regulation of the aircraft velocity (or the Machhold autopilot) as a secondary objective. It is shown through extensive simulations that the inherent robustness of the SMC design provides a convenient way to design controllers without gain scheduling, with transient performance that is far superior to that of a conventional gain-scheduled approach with integral control.

Automatic recovery of a combat aircraft from a completed Cobra and Herbst maneuver: A sliding mode control based scheme

“…The state dependent parts of the dynamics, desired profiles for , , and their time derivatives are collected in , , . The terms (i=1,2,3 and j=1, 2,3,4,5) in (8) also depend on states and their full expressions can be obtained in line with [9]. Pseudoinverse solves the underdetermined problem by minimizing the total control energy.…”

“…This calls for use of nonlinear control methods. Two wellknown nonlinear controller design techniques namely, Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) and Sliding Mode Control (SMC) have been applied to several aircraft flight control problems by many researchers over the last two decades [5,9,10,13,14]. In the present work, sliding mode controllers are designed to carry out both the maneuvers as well as the recovery schemes as they not only handle the nonlinearities effectively but also provide robustness to the uncertainty in the aerodynamic data.…”

Sliding Mode Control of Pitch-Rate of an F-16 Aircraft

“…Consequently, we believe that the results presented in this paper are a promising start to demonstrate the efficacy of the conditional integrator based SMC design to flight control. In fact, while we presented our design for control of the pitch-rate, an extension of our results to regulation of the angle of attack can be found in [23], while an extension to control of the lateral flight dynamics can be found in [30].…”

Controller Design for the Rotational Dynamics of a Quadcopter

“…For nonlinear systems, sliding mode control is designed. Seshagiri and Promtun [6] computed the angle of attack command using sliding mode controller based on model linearization. Two types of sliding surfaces were compared; the 1 st order and the 2 nd order and their experimental results proved that the performance of the 2 nd order SMC was better.…”