Receding horizon control of an F-16 aircraft: A comparative study

A comparison between Receding Horizon Control (RHC) approaches is presented for the longitudinal axis control of an F-16 aircraft. The results suggest that the flexibility provided by an adaptive RHC scheme based on flight condition dependent linear prediction models is a necessary requirement for achieving good performance as opposed to a single LTI model based method. The adaptive scheme offers an attractive alternative to a full nonlinear model based RHC approach by trading off an acceptable degradation in performance to modest computational complexity and real-time implementability.