Adaptive neural flight control for an aircraft with time-varying distributed delays

A novel adaptive neural network (NN) flight control law is developed for the high angle of attack (AOA) longitudinal motion control of an aircraft. Considering the unsteady effects, a longitudinal dynamic model is proposed, which is an uncertain nonstrict-feedback nonlinear system with time-varying distributed delays. Via combining a variable separation technique with the Lyapunov-Krasovskii function method, a robust adaptive NN high AOA flight control scheme is designed. Only the direction of the control gains is needed in the developed controller. Meanwhile, to reduce the computational burden, only two adaptive parameters are needed in the proposed control law. It is proven that the closed-loop system is stable, and all the signals of the closed-loop system are bounded. Finally, simulations are given to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed control law. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.