Experimental Flight Testing of a Fault-Tolerant Adaptive Autopilot for Fixed-Wing Aircraft

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fault-tolerant adaptive autopilot for fixed-wing aircraft, demonstrating its ability to compensate for degraded performance and control surface failures through simulations and real flight tests.

Contribution

It presents a novel adaptive autopilot architecture using retrospective cost adaptive control, tested under degraded and failure conditions in both simulations and physical flights.

Findings

Adaptive autopilot compensates for degraded fixed-gain autopilot performance.

The system effectively handles control surface stuck failures.

Experimental results show improved flight stability and control.

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive autopilot for fixed-wing aircraft and compares its performance with a fixed-gain autopilot. The adaptive autopilot is constructed by augmenting the autopilot architecture with adaptive control laws that are updated using retrospective cost adaptive control. In order to investigate the performance of the adaptive autopilot, the default gains of the fixed-gain autopilot are scaled to degrade its performance. This scenario provides a venue for determining the ability of the adaptive autopilot to compensate for the degraded fixed-gain autopilot. Next, the performance of the adaptive autopilot is examined under failure conditions by simulating a scenario where one of the control surfaces is assumed to be stuck at an unknown angle. The adaptive autopilot is also tested in physical flight experiments under degraded-nominal conditions, and the resulting performance improvement is examined.