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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 106 - La Jolla - October 2010
Agenda Location	7 SUBCOMMITTEE E – FLIGHT, PROPULSION, AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE CONTROL SYSTEMS 7.1 Flight Test of an L1 Adaptive Controller on the NASA AirSTAR Flight Test Vehicle
Title	Flight Test of an L1 Adaptive Controller on the NASA AirSTAR Flight Test Vehicle
Presenter	Irene Gregory
Affiliation	NASA LaRC
Available Downloads*	presentation
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Abstract	Flight Test of an L 1 Adaptive Controller on the NASA AirSTAR Flight Test Vehicle Irene M. Gregory NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA 23681-2199, USA PRESENTATION ABSTRACT One of the primary objectives of the Integrated Resilient Aircraft Control (IRAC) Project, under the auspices of the Aviation Safety Program, is to advance the state of the art in the adaptive control technology. Of particular interest is piloted flight under adverse conditions such as unusual attitudes, surface failures and structural damage. The IRAC Project is using subscale flight testing as an important tool in the evaluation of experimental adaptive control laws. This is particularly beneficial for the test and evaluation of control law performance beyond the edge of the normal flight envelope, where the risk of vehicle loss is high due to limited knowledge of nonlinear aerodynamics beyond stall and the potential for high structural loads. The Airborne Subscale Transport Aircraft Research (AirSTAR) system at the NASA Langley Research Center has been designed to provide a flexible research environment with the ability to conduct rapid prototyping and testing for control algorithms in extremely adverse flight conditions. Moreover, to supplement this effort, high fidelity nonlinear aerodynamic models for a subscale turbine powered Generic Transport Model (GTM) aircraft have been developed for an extended flight envelope depicted in Fig. 1. One essential objective for safe flight under adverse conditions is for the aircraft to never leave this extended flight envelope; once outside the boundary and in uncontrollable space, no guarantees for recovery can be made. Consequently, the adaptive controller should learn fast enough to keep the aircraft within the extended flight envelope. This implies that the control law action in the initial 2-3 seconds after initiation of an adverse condition is the key to safe flight. The available models of the extended flight envelope and the ability to safely fly in this region make the GTM an excellent vehicle for an in-depth look at various aspects of adaptive control pertinent to piloted dynamically scaled turbine powered aircraft. This paper presents flight test results on the dynamically scaled turbofan powered GTM for the L 1 adaptive control architecture that directly compensates for significant cross-coupling in multi-input and multi-output nonlinear system.