A Practical Approach to Automated Multiobjective Gust Load Alleviation Control Design in a Structured H_2/H_infinity Framework

Abstract

A gust load alleviation controller must reduce gust loads in the face of a challenging control problem and competing requirements. This may involve time- and frequency-domain objectives, limitations on the size and complexity of the controller, high-order aeroelastic aircraft models, limited system performance, and robustness against complex aeroelastic uncertainties. Tuning such a controller is often difficult and time consuming, and simplified approaches tend to fall short of the performance which can actually be reached. Using a weighted H_2 specification and a set of relatively simple heuristics, gust load alleviation controllers can be automatically iterated to reach a set of performance objectives and constraints. This method is shown to work fairly well and to consistently produce the same outcome, however the design process is sensitive to randomness in the synthesis tool.