A model reference robust control with application to a flight control system design

In this paper, a new model reference robust control scheme for plants with relative degree greater than one is proposed for the purpose of coping with the “explosion of complexity” problem in control law design. The key of the scheme is that we use a first‐order filter to link each subsystem, so that the derivative of some nonlinear functions can be avoided. As a result, the final control law can be greatly simplified. The application of this scheme to a flight control system shows that both the tracking performance and the control effort can be improved significantly in comparison with earlier research.