Dynamic Contraction Method approach to digital longitudinal aircraft flight controller design

This paper presents the design of digital controller for longitudinal aircraft model based on the Dynamic Contraction Method. The control task is formulated as a tracking problem of velocity and flight path angle, where decoupled output transients are accomplished in spite of incomplete information about varying parameters of the system and external disturbances. The design of digital controller based on the pseudo-continuous approach is presented, where the digital controller is the result of continuous-time controller discretization. A resulting output feedback controller has a simple form of a combination of low-order linear dynamical systems and a matrix whose entries depend nonlinearly on certain known process variables. Simulation results for an aircraft model confirm theoretical expectations.