Flight control design with hierarchical dynamic inversion

Hierarchical dynamic inversion (HDI) is proposed together with newly developed variant-factor and recursive control techniques to design autonomous flight control (AFC) laws for fixed-wing aircraft. HDI is applicable to control design of some non-affine nonlinear systems to which dynamic inversion is not applicable. The AFC law designed with HDI at the nominal flight condition is applicable to other flight conditions in a wide flight envelope so that workload can be reduced significantly in AFC design compared to gain scheduling. The simulation results demonstrate that with the AFC law designed with HDI, the aircraft successfully completes the pre-scheduled maneuvering flight in a subsonic flight envelope.