Performance improvement by feedforward: application to civil aircraft control design

This paper presents two methodologies allowing a performance improvement for the control of a civil aircraft. In both cases, the noninteractivity in steady state will be achieved by an integral control design in order to be robust with respect to parameter uncertainties or disturbances. However, this structure will not lead to sufficiently good performance: the performance in terms of decoupling and time responses will be ensured by introducing a feedforward. In both cases, the transient mode/output decoupling will be achieved by eigenvector assignment In the first methodology, the feedforward will improve the time response of the system while in the second one, the feedforward will ensure the transient reference input/mode decoupling. These two methodologies will be illustrated by simulations obtained for a civil aircraft in lateral flight