Limits of performance of a tailless fighter in the presence of saturation

In this paper, the authors apply ℓ₁-based methods to the pitch control of a Tail-less Advanced Fighter Aircraft (TAFA) developed by Boeing St. Louis, to directly and accurately assess the fundamental trade-offs between performance limits and saturation position and rate constraints. Linear input-output and nonlinear state-space design techniques are utilized. Although the nonlinear methods are computationally significantly more complex, they offer flexibility to accurately address performance in the presence of broader classes of constraints such as nonsymmetric saturation levels.