Design of a supervised flight control system for aircraft relative guidance

In this paper, the automation of the relative guidance is performed thanks to the recursive non-linear control technique, namely backstepping according to M. Krstic et al. (1995). This is quite new design methodology for construction of both feedback control laws and associated Lyapunov functions in a systematic manner. In order to tackle safety and passenger comfort aspects, which are crucial points for commercial aircraft, the controller is supervised: the purpose of this device is to handle on-line the gain of the controller, taking into account the current value of the state in order to satisfy some limitations in commercial aircraft maneuvering capabilities.