Nonlinear adaptive flight control of autonomous aircraft

This paper presents a novel nonlinear and adaptive control scheme for the stabilisation and trajectory tracking of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). The main feature of the proposed scheme is that it consists of a single nonlinear adaptive control law covering the entire flight envelope and it does not require accurate knowledge of the aerodynamic coefficients, which are estimated on-line. The design is based on a recently developed adaptive control framework providing a modular controller-estimator structure that is relatively easy to tune. The proposed scheme is tested via simulations on a detailed model of the Eclipse flight demonstrator.