An Overview of Adaptive Approaches in Flight Control

Multi-mode switching between controllers corresponding to different modes of operation is needed in those cases when the transition from one mode to another results in substantial flight-critical variations in the aircraft dynamics. To address this problem, a general framework for multi-modal flight control is proposed. The framework is based on the Multiple Models, Switching and Tuning (MMST) methodology, combined with Model-Predictive Control (MPC), and the use of different robust mechanisms for switching between the multi-modal controllers. It was shown that many different switching control strategies can be naturally derived from the basic framework, which demonstrates the generality of the proposed approach.