The ability of backstepping controllers to deal with nonlinearities make this technique a suitable candidate for the control of small fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The authors have already proposed a comprehensive approach combining backstepping with PID controllers for simultaneous longitudinal and latero-directional control of fixed-wing UAVs, achieving good performance even wit...

A multidisciplinary research effort that combines aerodynamic modeling and gain-scheduled control design for aircraft flight at post-stall conditions is described. The aerodynamic modeling uses a decambering approach for rapid prediction of post-stall aerodynamic characteristics of multiple-wing configurations using known section data. The approach is successful in bringing to light multiple so...

New procedures and technologies of Air Traffic Control (ATC) under development in Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) will change controllers' tasks, roles, and responsibilities. However, cognitive complexity will remain one of the limiting factors in future system's capacity and none of existing complexity metrics can be directly extended to evaluate cognitive complexity under ...

For control law design it is necessary to work with controller models and plant models of diierent complexity. During the control law design iteration it should be possible to adjust both the complexity of the controller model and the complexity of the plant model in order to evaluate the compromise between necessary control complexity and achievable control performance. Controller models on th...

We design a feedback control architecture for longitudinal flight of an aircraft. The multi-level architecture includes the flight control loop to govern the short term dynamics of the aircraft, and the autopilot to control the long term modes. Using H∞ performance and robustness criteria, the problem is cast as a non-convex and non-smooth optimization program. We present a non-convex bundle me...

London Heathrow Airport is a very popular and busy airport. Indeed it is one of the busiest airports in the world. In order to control noise for residents on flight paths, only one of Heathrow’s two parallel runways can be used for departures at any given time. We aim to increase the throughput of the departure system, and in particular the runway, which is a bottleneck for the whole system. Mi...

In this thesis, several essential tasks in the control design process for integrated flight control of large, flexible aircraft are investigated and extended in the following four core areas: First, several extensions to the convex control design methodology are proposed, including the development of an efficient numeric optimization tool and solution onsets to generate stable stabilizing contr...

The genetic programming approach is applied to the problem of aircraft autolanding, subject to wind disturbances. The derived control law is tested successfully, using a linearised model of a commercial aircraft. The evolutionary control of autolanding is done within the desired operational envelope.