The concept of adaptive control design has appealed to the weapon systems design community for decades. Motivating factors for continued research in adaptive flight control technology include, but are not limited to the potential for reduced development costs and the increased design versatility afforded airframe designers. Although there are few adaptive autopilots flying today, some success has been achieved in industry in the adaptive control of air vehicles. The price that is typically paid with adaptive control techniques, however is algorithm and software complexity. These complexities increase significantly when the controllers are forced to operate in regions where the vehicle aerodynamics are highly non-linear. We have developed a break-though approach in adaptive vehicle control that is virtually trivial to implement, is highly robust, and is easily adaptable to the non-linear scenario. The proposed research will prove the robustness and technical feasibility of our adaptive autopilot design technique. This research effort will also provide the opportunity to formulate the adaptive autopilot observer to include the estimation of non-linear aerodynamic parameters required by our non-linear autopilot structure. The development of an adaptive non-linear autopilot will also serve to exploit and expand upon our existing non-linear design technique.
Keywords: Autopilots, Guidance And Control, Missiles, Uavs, Non-Linear Autopilot, Adaptive Autopilot, Feedback
