Design of a Digital Adaptive Flight Control Law for the ALFLEX

In this report, a longitudinal adaptive flight control law is presented for the automatic landing system of a Japanese automatic landing flight experiment vehicle (ALFLEX). The longitudinal adaptive flight control law is designed to track an output of the vehicle to a guidance signal from the guidance portion of the automatic landing system. The proposed adaptive control law in the attitude control portion adjusts the controller gains continuously online as flight conditions change, in spite of the existence of unmodeled dynamics. The number of the controller gains to be adjusted is decreased to 1/2 from the previous studies. Computer simulation involving six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear flight dynamics is performed to examine the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control law. In order to verify the influence of the dispersion of the initial conditions, the Monte Carlo simulation is also applied. The initial conditions are more widely dispersed than the previous studies. As a result, except under the unsuitable initial conditions, the ALFLEX successfully landed on the runway.