RFPT-based adaptive control of a small aeroplane model

The realization of small, unmanned, automatic airplanes is a significant project at Óbuda University. Essential results have been achieved regarding automatic take-off and navigation. Another another important research field is development of design methods for adaptive controllers as alternatives to the Lyapunov function technique. For guaranteeing global stability this method means the realization of a complicated process that does not reveal subtle details of the trajectory tracking of the controlled system. These details depend on the numerous adaptive parameters of the Lyapunov function the optimal setting of which can be achieved e.g. by evolutionary techniques and ample numerical investigations. The suggested alternative primarily concentrated on these details and has only a few parameters. Without complementary parameter tuning only local stability can be achieved, but for a wide set of physical systems tuning only one of its parameters can maintain global stability. Our aim is to integrate these researches. The here presented results, i.e. that of simulation investigations on the “Robust Fixed Point Transformations (RFPT)” based control of the linearized model of a small airplane mean the first definite step in this direction. The convergence of the controller is stabilized by independent agents (model-independent observers) that are able to recognize whether the tuned control parameter approached the boundary of convergence and intervenes the tuning process accordingly. The expectation is the improvement of the already existing control algorithms.