A study of flight manoeuvres for the PVTOL aircraft model

We study several flight control problems for the standard planar vertical take off and landing (PVTOL) flight control model, which has been developed as a simplified model for Harrier-like aircraft. In particular, we study the execution of a manoeuvre for which the aircraft is intended to follow a circular path in a vertical plane. We first formulate the problem as a nonlinear tracking control problem. Controllers are developed for two cases: a non-aggressive manoeuvre and an aggressive manoeuvre. We demonstrate the need to develop a controller that includes feedforward terms in order to achieve aggressive maneuvering. We next formulate a related path following or manoeuvre regulation problem. A controller is developed for this case, and it is compared with a controller that solves the related output tracking problem. This comparison demonstrates the practical value of the manoeuvre regulation controller. Our approach throughout is to make use of nonlinear control theory, which is complicated by the non-minimum phase characteristics of the PVTOL model