An Adaptive Digital Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft with Actuator Faults
This addresses the problem of flight safety and reliability for fixed-wing aircraft in the presence of faults, but it is incremental as it builds on existing autopilot architectures and adaptive control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of controlling fixed-wing aircraft with actuator faults by developing an adaptive digital autopilot and comparing it to a fixed-gain autopilot. The result shows performance improvements in simulations, including compensation for detuned gains and handling of stuck control surfaces.
This paper develops an adaptive digital autopilot for a fixed-wing aircraft and compares its performance with a fixed-gain autopilot. The adaptive digital autopilot is constructed by augmenting the autopilot architecture implemented in PX4 flight stack with adaptive digital control laws that are updated using the retrospective cost adaptive control algorithm. In order to investigate the performance of the adaptive digital autopilot, the default gains of the fixed-gain autopilot are scaled down to degrade its performance. This scenario provides a venue for determining the ability of the adaptive digital autopilot to compensate for the detuned fixed-gain autopilot. Next, the performance of the adaptive autopilot is examined under failure conditions by simulating a scenario where one of the control surfaces is assumed to be stuck at an unknown angular position. The adaptive digital autopilot is tested in simulation, and the resulting performance improvements are examined.