Automatic Regulation of Airspeed and Altitude of Aircraft Using LQR

In this work, we investigate the optimal control problem of regulating the airspeed and altitude of an airplane solely by using the elevator angle. The proposed Linear Quadratic Controller (LQR) is optimized using a Genetic Algorithm with the objective of finding the optimal weighting matrices of the optimal controller cost function. In comparison to the controllers published in other literatures, the proposed control scheme yields improved response times and magnitude.