Adaptive Flight Control Design for the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper we use L₁ adaptive controller to augment a baseline for improved command tracking of the unmanned aerial vehicle. The procedure included baseline and adaptive augmentation controllers design. The eigenstructure assignment (EA) controller was designed for the nominal case, and then was augmented with a L₁ adaptive controller. The L₁ adaptive control methodology offered an adaptive contributor to compensate unknown uncertainties and modeled errors. The proposed adaptive systematic framework has satisfactory performance both in transient and steady state, as well as error signals remain bounded. The simulation results demonstrate the adaptation scheme can improve transient command tracking performance, even in the presence of system uncertainties, and unmatched disturbances.