Roll Angle Control of an Aircraft using Adaptive Controllers

Roll angle control (RAC) is required for the lateral stability of an aircraft. Lateral stability makes the aircraft more stable around the longitudinal axis. In this paper, a roll control system for an aircraft that controls roll angle motion is considered and simulated. As the complexity of aircrafts increases, classical controllers (i.e., PID) becomes unsatisfactory to yield acceptable performance because of the changes in environmental conditions, variation in process dynamics by non-linear actuators and changes in character of the disturbances. To overcome the above problem adaptive controllers i.e., Model Reference Adaptive Controller and Self Tuning Controller are used for RAC, as adaptive controllers have the capability to change according to the environmental conditions. From the Simulation results, it is observed that Self Tuning Controller delivers the best performance.