Application of system identification techniques to flight control

An approach to reconfigurable flight control, which utilizes continuous system identification of the aircraft´s stability and control derivatives, is proposed. The basic approach is to include prior knowledge of the derivatives in the linear regression formulation. This is done through the use of ridge regression and mixed estimation from the mathematical statistics literature. The experimental part of this work is based on a linearized longitudinal fourth-order F-16 model and includes appropriate sensor (measurement) noise. The experiment shows that even during periods of low excitation, the short period parameter estimates are improved