A novel structure design and control strategy for an aircraft active sidestick

This paper is concerned with a new design of an aircraft active sidestick based on Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine (PMSM) and proposes an innovative robust control strategy based on an adaptive optimal sliding mode controller. Indeed, such an application requires high performance specifications which impose many constraints (torque, torques ripples, temperature). Here, a new design for the sidestick actuator is provided with a specific structure: a double airgap rotating one adapted to the considered process. Then, an optimization is performed to enhance the set of specifications of the PMSM w.r.t the aeronautical application. Also, a new adaptive optimal robust control for the designed actuator is provided based on the linear quadratic approach combined with the sliding mode control method. Then, an adaptive disturbances rejection is performed with the proposed strategy. Due to the considered design of the actuator (1/12 of a complete PMSM), a position control is achieved based on the LQRSliding mode approach to meet the required performances and to manage the plant parameter variation and load disturbances. Also, a varying parameter is used to adapt "on-line" the considered control to the varying level of disturbance that affect the system. First simulation results of the considered strategy applied to the newly designed actuator (compared to other strategies) proves the efficiency of the proposed solution for position control of the actuator and robustness considering load disturbances. Keywords: Aircraft sidestick, actuator design, structure optimisation, linear varying parameter, linear quadratic control, sliding mode control.