Flight Control System for a Computer Controlled Aircraft with Limited Sensors

摘要

The Department of Electrical Engineering at the United States Air Force Academy is attempting, through one of its senior design courses, to design, build, and fly a computer controlled aircraft. The Department of Aeronautics was asked to help design the flight control system to be implemented by the on-board digital computer. The project involved building and testing a wind tunnel model of the aircraft to determine its aerodynamic characteristics, performing mass tests on the actual aircraft to determine inertia characteristics, developing a 12 degree-of-freedom nonlinear aircraft simulation computer program, and designing the actual flight control system. This report describes only the last task. A complete flight control system for a small computer controlled aircraft was designed using only yaw rate, heading, lateral load factor, airspeed, altitude, and rate of climb feedback. This multi-input multi-output control problem was done using the classical root locus technique on a linearized system model. The simulation results revealed surprisingly good performance, considering the limitation on sensors.