H Infinity Robust Control for Gust Load Alleviation of Geometrically Nonlinear Flexible Aircraft

Abstract

H Infinity robust control synthesis for gust load alleviation of very flexible aircraft is presented. The controller is synthesised on a compact reduced-order model comprising 8 degrees of freedom for the UAV configuration and 9 for the flying-wing, obtained through nonlinear model order reduction of the coupled fluid-structure-flight dynamics system, and validated on the full nonlinear model. The control architecture employs trailing-edge flap deflection as the actuator and wing-tip displacement as the performance output, with an input-shaping weighting function Kc that governs the trade-off between structural load alleviation and rigid-body trajectory deviation. Results are presented for a Global Hawk-like UAV and a very flexible flying-wing configuration. The methodology demonstrates that H infinity controllers designed on low-order ROMs can robustly alleviate gust loads when applied to high-dimensional nonlinear aeroelastic systems.