Aircraft Using Adaptive Control

Surface and hardware failure affect the flight control system of the F-16 fighter aircraft. In the absence of failures and unpredictable changes. the controller, based on gain scheduling performs very well and exhibits a good degree of robustness, even for high angles of attack. In order to accommodate for possible failures and maintain good performance characteristics, the control system is augmented with a hybrid adaptive linear quadratic control scheme. The augmented a aptive ilight control system has the on-line capability of learning and accommodatlng to drastic changes in the aircraft dynamics due to surface or hardware failure. The proposed flight control system is tested on the nonlinear model of the F-I6 aircraft and the simulation results demonstrate its ability to accommodate control failures and maintain good performance.