Robust Adaptive Control of a Twin-Rotor Aircraft

We propose robust adaptive control designs for a twin-rotor aircraft with specific focus on attaining good disturbance attenuation properties to facilitate operation in a shipboard environment wherein the aircraft is subject to severe aerodynamic disturbances including ship airwake, deck vortices, and rotor downwash especially during ship roll and pitch motions. Furthermore, the controllers can operate on their own or can gracefully co-exist with a baseline controller in a control augmentation fashion thus minimizing flight software change impact. The performance of the proposed controllers was validated through extensive simulation studies.