GAIN-SCHEDULED FLIGHT CONTROL LAW FOR FLEXIBLE AIRCRAFT: A PRACTICAL APPROACH

This paper presents a gain-scheduling method applied to flight control law design. The method is a stability preserving interpolation technique of existing controllers under observer-state feedback form. Application is made on a flexible civil aircraft example considering multiple scheduling parameters. Although the interpolation technique gives powerful a priori stability guarantees, the sufficient condition to satisfy leads to conservative results in practice. We thus use a fixed observer model and check stability and performance thanks to μ-analysis. Provided results are really satisfactory for a final controller of little complexity.