A L1 Adaptive Control Scheme for UAV Carrier Landing Using Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

This paper presents a L1 adaptive controller augmenting a dynamic inversion controller for UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) carrier landing. A three axis and a power compensator NDI (nonlinear dynamic inversion) controller serves as the baseline controller for this architecture. The inner-loop command inputs are roll-rate, pitch-rate, yaw-rate, and thrust commands. The outer-loop command inputs come from the guidance law to correct the glide slope. However, imperfect model inversion and nonaccurate aerodynamic data may cause degradation of performance and may lead to the failure of the carrier landing. The L1 adaptive controller is designed as augmentation controller to account for matched and unmatched system uncertainties. The performance of the controller is examined through a Monte Carlo simulation which shows the effectiveness of the developed L1 adaptive control scheme based on nonlinear dynamic inversion.