Real Time Aerodynamic Parameter Estimation Schemes- a Survey, Implementation and Comparison

Real-time estimation of aircraft aerodynamic models is very essential for adaptive and indirect reconfigurable control.In this report a literature survey of some of the available real time techniques for aircraft aerodynamic parameter estimation is presented. A time domain algorithm based on UD factorization extended Kalman filter (UDEKF) and a frequency domain algorithm based on recursive discrete Fourier transform (DFT) for real-time estimation of aircraft longitudinal and lateral aerodynamic parameters are implemented and validated using simulated data in PC/MATLAB environment. The robustness of the algorithms to noise, bias and drift is tested using simulated data of the longitudinal short period and lateral Dutch roll dynamics of an aircraft. A comparison is also made between the performance of the time domain and frequency domain techniques to ascertain their suitability for real time parameter estimation. It is observed that the DFT utperforms UDEKF in terms of parameter estimation error norm, error bounds and requires less computational time