Robustness Assessment of a Load Factor Flight Control Law Using Dilation Integrals*

This article presents a robust performance assessment approach of a load factor flight control law with the goal of ascertaining whether the closed-loop system's poles all lie within a given subregion of the open left half-plane despite center of gravity and mass variations. The method combines a guardian map approach with dilation integrals to tackle the underlying difficult polynomial positivity test by relaxing the latter to a so-called 'practical' positivity one. The study is carried out for a longitudinal uncertain model of a F-16 aircraft with varying center of gravity position and mass with the purpose of testing such an approach.