Design and Flight Testing of Incremental Control Laws using Angular Accelerometer Feedback on a CS-25 Aircraft

Abstract

This paper discusses the design, implementation and flight testing of an incremental Backstepping (IBS) based manual flight control law with angular accelerometer (AA) feedback. The main advantages of incremental control laws is that they only require a partial model of the system and are of low complexity. Incremental control laws for aircraft rotational motion, however, need angular acceleration measurements to compute the control increments. Previously, estimates based on angular rate measurements were used for this. The newly implemented AA feedback is expected to improve the performance by decreasing the sensor delay. The manual control laws command roll rate/angle, side slip angle and vertical load factor and have been implemented on a Cessna Citation II aircraft, which is equipped with an experimental fly-by-wire system. The IBS based control law has an integrated integral control term and uses Pseudo Control Hedging to handle actuator saturations. The IBS based control law has highly satisfactory performance in flight. Test manoeuvres included standard roll and load factor commands and asymmetric thrust handling. Fault tolerance has been compared in a nonlinear simulation for the controllers with and without AA feedback in simulation. In general, the angular accelerometer feedback improved the tolerance to mismatch substantially.