A nonlinear flight controller design for a UFO by trajectory linearization method. II. Controller design

For part I, see ibid., p.97-102 (2002). We present an attitude controller design for a 3 DOF flight control experiment apparatus, the Quanser UFO, as an application of the multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear tracking and decoupling control technique based on a trajectory linearization method. The controller consists of two parts: a pseudo-inverse of the plant that computes the nominal control, and a linear time-varying regulator that stabilizes and decouples the tracking error dynamics. For regulating the attitude and the body rate tracking errors, inner and outer loop PI controllers are employed, which are designed by time-varying bandwidth PD-eigenstructure assignment. The presented trajectory linearization method for tracking error stabilization and decoupling is proved to be an effective method to achieve the "good" flying qualities by simulation tests.