Integration of dynamic flight envelope into the L₁ adaptive control framework

The paper presents the first step towards integrating a dynamic flight envelope into the robust fault tolerant L₁ adaptive control architecture. We propose a switched L₁ adaptive control architecture to trade aircraft desired performance with guaranteed system stability under a class of faults and failures in flight control systems, which cannot be handled by a single flight controller. The controller switches only when the aircraft is in an extremely adverse situation corresponding to significant changes in the dynamics. Uniform performance bounds are derived on the difference between the states of the aircraft and a switched ideal model, associated with the failures. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of the approach. With the proposed scheme, the flight control system can compensate for a larger class of uncertainties compared with the conventional approaches without significantly increasing the system complexity.