Robust control of F-16 lateral dynamics

We consider the application of a conditional integrator based continuous sliding mode control design for robust regulation of MIMO minimum-phase nonlinear systems to the control of the lateral flight dynamics of an F-16 aircraft. The system is non-affine in the input but can be rewritten as the perturbation of a control affine system with matched (input-dependent) disturbances. A parameter dependent transformation brings the system to normal form, for which an output-feedback control can be designed to achieve robust regulation. We provide analytical results for stability, and also show through extensive simulations that the inherent robustness of the SMC design provides a convenient way to design controllers without adaptation for the unknown parameters, with a transient performance that is comparable to discontinuous SMC, but without suffering from the drawback of control chattering.