Constrained predictive strategies for flight control systems

The complexity of nowadays flight control systems arises from the engineering prescription to properly merge and integrate actuators, sensors and computing units within complex data network structures. The use of many different sensors and actuators, the presence of nonlinear phenomena, dynamic effects due to switching operating conditions as well as physical constraints due to input/state saturations are of paramount relevance when designing a modern flight control strategy, especially in the case of high performance aircrafts. In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of recent constrained predictive control strategies when they are used to deal with specific aircraft control problems. Numerical simulations are presented on a High Altitude Performance Demonstrator unmanned air vehicle adopting two different predictive strategies both dealing with redundant and saturating actuators.