High performance flight control systems based on the nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) principle require highly accurate models of aircraft aerodynamics. In general, the accuracy of the internal model determines to what degree the system nonlinearities can be canceled; the more accurate the model, the better the cancellation, and with that, the higher the performance of the controller. In this paper a new control system is presented that combines NDI with multivariate simplex spline based control allocation. We present three control allocation strategies which use novel expressions for the analytical Jacobian and Hessian of the multivariate spline models. Multivariate simplex splines have a higher approximation power than ordinary polynomial models, and are capable of accurately modeling nonlinear aerodynamics over the entire flight envelope of an aircraft. This new method, indicated as SNDI, is applied to control a high performance aircraft (F-16) with a large flight envelope. The simulation results indicate that the SNDI controller can achieve feedback linearization throughout the entire flight envelope, leading to a significant increase in tracking performance compared to ordinary polynomial based NDI.
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