Flight validation of a metrics driven L1 adaptive control

The paper addresses initial steps involved in the development and flight implementation of new metrics driven L₁ adaptive flight control system. The work concentrates on (i) definition of appropriate control driven metrics that account for the control surface failures; (ii) tailoring recently developed L₁ adaptive controller to the design of adaptive flight control systems that explicitly address these metrics in the presence of control surface failures and dynamic changes under adverse flight conditions; (iii) development of a flight control system for implementation of the resulting algorithms onboard of small UAV; and (iv) conducting a comprehensive flight test program that demonstrates performance of the developed adaptive control algorithms in the presence of failures. As the initial milestone the paper concentrates on the adaptive flight system setup and initial efforts addressing the ability of a commercial off-the-shelf autopilot with and without adaptive augmentation to recover from control surface failures.