Accommodation of failures in the F-16 aircraft using adaptive control

Surface and hardware failure affect the flight control system of the F-16 fighter aircraft. In the absence of failures and unpredictable changes, the controller, based on gain scheduling, performs very well and exhibits a good degree of robustness, even for high angles of attack. In order to accommodate for possible failure and maintain good performance characteristics, the control system is augmented with a hybrid adaptive linear quadratic control scheme. The augmented adaptive flight control system has the online capability for learning and accommodating to drastic changes in the aircraft dynamics due to surface or hardware failure. The proposed flight control system has been tested on the nonlinear model of the F-16 aircraft, and the simulation results demonstrate its ability to accommodate control failures and maintain good performance.<>