Flight Controller Design to Simulate Gust Responses and Pilot Input Responses

—Design Examples for Lateral/Directional Motions of MuPAL-α and Their Results of Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulations and Flight Tests—

Abstract

This paper considers the design problem of flight controllers that simulate gust responses and pilot input responses simultaneously, and proposes a method to realize those; robust model-matching controllers are designed as feedback controllers using scaled H_∞ problems to simulate the gust responses of target aircraft, and right inverse systems are designed as feedforward controllers using H_∞ problems to simulate the pilot input responses of the aircraft. For the lateral/directional motions of an experimental aircraft, we design such controllers for two aircraft models. To confirm their performance, hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight tests are conducted, and they show that designed controllers have good performance.