Manual flight control with saturating actuators

The objectives of this article are to concisely state the tracking control problem with actuator saturation, briefly review the current literature, and formulate the problem in a manual (flight) control context. The complexity of tracking control with saturation is demonstrated via a simple example. A new approach to the manual flight control problem with both rate and amplitude actuator constraints, referred to as linear quadratic tracking (LQT), is outlined. This approach is specifically directed toward the dynamic tracking control problem subject to both displacement and rate actuator constraints, particularly for the challenging case of open-loop unstable plants, which are of current interest in flight control. At the same time, due to the low order of the simplified plant models used in flight control it is reasonable to assume full state feedback is available, although the tracked variable is a scalar, e.g., pitch rate. The saturation avoidance aspect of the proposed LQT solution is demonstrated for the simple example.