Verifiable Adaptive Flight Control: Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle and Aerial Refueling

This paper presents the L 1 adaptive controller for two benchmark flight control applications. The benefit of the proposed adaptive control approach is its promise for development of theoretically justified tools for verification and validation of adaptive systems. It has a priori predictable performance bounds and a guaranteed bounded-away-from-zero, time-delay margin in the presence of fast adaptation. Two flight control examples, unmanned combat aerial vehicle and aerial refueling autopilot, are considered in the presence of nonlinear uncertainties and control surface failures. The L 1 adaptive controller without any redesign leads to a scaled response for the system input and output signals, dependent upon changes in the initial conditions, the reference inputs, and the uncertainties.