A Single Loop Dynamic Inversion Control for a Fighter Aircraft Executing Rapid Large Amplitude Maneuvers

Modern fighter aircraft undergo rapid and large angular excursions about the body axes in order to execute various complex maneuvers. Such severe flight conditions force the aircraft dynamics to nonlinear regime thereby making nonlinear control implementation almost unavoidable. Such nonlinear controls are usually formulated in inner and outer loops based on the two time scale separation principle. The present paper demonstrates that to perform certain maneuvers, nonlinear control can also be formulated on a single loop without resorting to such a slow-fast separation assumption for the dynamics. To validate the efficacy of the proposed method, nonlinear dynamic inversion controls are designed using this alternate formulation to automatically carry out two very well-known maneuvers cobra and aileron roll maneuver and the corresponding MATLAB simulation results are presented.