Quadratic Programming Approach to Flight Envelope Protection Using Control Barrier Functions
This addresses safety risks like stall and loss of control in aerospace systems, offering a robust alternative to conventional methods, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing control barrier function techniques.
The paper tackles flight envelope protection by introducing a quadratic-programming-based safety filter using control barrier functions to dynamically enforce constraints, and results show it prevents violations while minimizing conservatism in a simulated missile flight control system.
Ensuring the safe operation of aerospace systems within their prescribed flight envelope is a fundamental requirement for modern flight control systems. Flight envelope protection (FEP) prevents violations of aerodynamic, structural, and performance constraints, mitigating risks such as stall, excessive loads, and loss of control. Conventional FEP approaches, such as reference clipping via saturation functions and model-based command filtering, impose constraints at the reference input level but often fail to account for closed-loop system dynamics, potentially leading to constraint violations during transients. This paper introduces a new approach to flight envelope protection by employing a quadratic-programming-based safety filter using control barrier functions to dynamically enforce flight envelope constraints while preserving control performance. Unlike traditional reference filtering methods, the proposed control barrier function-based safety filter actively ensures forward invariance of the safe flight envelope set while seamlessly integrating with existing control architectures. The framework is implemented in a nonlinear missile flight control system and evaluated in a simulated environment. The results demonstrate its ability to prevent constraint violations while minimizing conservatism, offering a robust alternative to existing flight envelope protection methodologies.