A Survey of Advanced Flight Control Theory and Application

Modern flight control system is a MIMO and cross-coupling nonlinear system, but traditional proportional-plus-integral strategy, with gain scheduling, optimizes parameters by linear feedback in one-loop-at-a-time and is hard to meet these rigid requirements, so it is emergent to explore advanced control approaches including linearity and nonlinearity today. Although recently some advanced flight control techniques have been demonstrated in modern aircrafts such as F-16, there are much more extensive problems to be studied such as system nonlinearity, deeply coupling between longitudinal- and lateralmotion, efficient evaluation of control redundancy allocation, flight path planning in complex environment, and on-line fault detection and self-repairing etc. This paper mainly discusses about modern flight control theory, design approaches and their applications. Author briefly introduces design approaches of modern flight control including linear control of linear quadratic regulator, robust flight control and nonlinear control of dynamic inversion and intelligent flight control etc. and shows their potential strengths and weaknesses, and discusses some promising applications of them as well