Anti-windup synthesis for PIO avoidance in an experimental aircraft

This paper demonstrates the application of a recently developed anti-windup technique for systems with rate-saturated actuators, to a realistic flight control example. The paper makes two contributions: firstly a new approach to tuning the anti-windup compensator is devised, allowing a transparent trade-off between performance and the size of an estimate of the region of attraction. Secondly, the anti-windup algorithm is applied to a nonlinear simulation model of the longitudinal and lateral dynamics of an experimental aircraft. The results show the potential of anti-windup to lessen an aircraft´s susceptibility to pilot-induced-oscillations. This promise has since been confirmed in flight tests