Aircraft maneuver regulation: A receding horizon backstepping approach

Coordinated flight is a nonholonomic constraint that implies no sideslip of an aircraft. The equations of motion in coordinated flight are kinematically reducible. This property simplifies the maneuver regulation problem because under such assumption it is possible to write a lateral controller for the transverse dynamics independent of velocity. Assuming coordinated flight, the maneuver regulator consists of a model predictive controller based on the kinematic model. Since, in reality the coordinated flight assumption is seldom satisfied, the kinematic control action is back-stepped into dynamics to compute the actuation of the control surfaces. The proposed control law is tested on a multi-body SW model of an aircraft on various maneuvers, including some aggressive ones.