System Identification, HIL and Flight Testing of an Adaptive Controller on a Small Scale Unmanned Aircraft

摘要

This paper summarizes and presents system identification and general aviation (GA) Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) law testing on a small scaled unmanned aircraft platform, built using Commercial-off-the Shelf Components. A frequency domain approach is used to identify the flight dynamics of the aircraft. The parameterized aircraft is used as a very low-cost test bed for validation of general aviation (GA) flight control algorithms. The identified dynamic coefficients are used for Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) X-Plane simulation and flight testing of a Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) flight controller. The controller tracks flight path angle and airspeed commands. The command tracking is tested in HIL simulation mode and verified with flight testing. Initial flight test results preformed on the Bixler 2 airframe are presented and discussed.