Adaptive energy based control for the longitudinal dynamics of a fixed-wing aircraft

This paper presents an adaptive total energy control approach to regulate the airspeed and the flight path angle of a fixed wing aircraft. The control strategy results from a nonlinear description of the total energy control system approach, and only requires the knowledge of the structure of the aerodynamic drag coefficient as well as the sign of the aerodynamic control derivative related to the variation of the pitch moment due to the elevator input. The aerodynamic characteristics of the experimental aircraft were obtained from an open source computational fluid dynamics software. Experimental results are presented to verify the performance of the proposed controller.