Experimental validation of a metrics driven ℒ₁ adaptive control in the presence of general unmodeled dynamics

The paper summarizes the results of an ongoing effort in the development and flight validation and verification of the metrics driven ℒ₁ adaptive flight control system. In particular, the paper develops a unified framework for design, implementation, validation and verification of flight critical control systems including: (i) definition of experimental control validation technique that accounts for control surface failures and generalized plant uncertainties or unmodeled dynamics; (ii) tuning the developed ℒ₁ adaptive controller to explicitly address performance metrics in the presence of control actuator/surface failures and modeling uncertainties under adverse flight conditions; (iii) development of a flight control system testing environment that includes both hardware and software setup for implementation of the resulting algorithms onboard of a small unmanned aerial vehicle; and (iv) designing and conducting of a comprehensive flight test validation and verification program that demonstrates performance of the proposed adaptive control algorithms in the presence of failures.