Clearance of a small scale remotely piloted aircraft by means of a polynomial based analysis method

In this paper an overview on polynomial based analysis methods for application to robust stability of linear systems subject to uncertain parameters is presented. A comparison among the most important Kharitonov type approaches proposed in literature and their applicability to the flight control law clearance problem of highly augmented aircraft is also discussed. A novel algorithm is then proposed, which can deal with high order uncertain dynamic aircraft models within reasonable computation time by introducing some degree of approximation in determining the clearance region's shape. Application to robustness analysis of an augmented small scale unmanned aircraft is finally presented, whose uncertain high order open loop dynamic model has been tuned with inflight experimental data.