Non-linear and adaptive flight control of autonomous aircraft using invariant manifolds

This article presents a novel non-linear and adaptive control scheme for the stabilization, command following, and trajectory tracking of autonomous aerial vehicles. The main feature of the proposed flight control system is that it consists of a single non-linear adaptive control law covering the entire flight envelope and does not require accurate knowledge of the aerodynamic coefficients, which are estimated on-line. The design follows a recently developed adaptive control framework that is based on the notion of invariant manifold and provides a modular controller estimator structure that is relatively easy to tune. The proposed scheme is tested via simulations on two different models of unmanned aerial vehicles: the XRAE-140 and the Eclipse flight demonstrator.