COOPERATIVE PILOT-OPTIMAL AUGMENTATION SYSTEM SYNTHESIS FOR COMPLEX FLIGHT VEHICLES

Development of new control configured flight vehicles has introduced challenging problems in both the areas of control system design and handling qualities specifications. Standard design techniques based on open-loop criteria and a posteriori handling qualities verification for pilot\u27s acceptability have proved to be often inadequate when applied to the above vehicles because of the lack of information and unprecedented properties of their behavior. Using the concepts originated by Schmidt, a control system design approach for optimal stability augmentation systems using limited state feedback theory, with the specific inclusion of the human pilot in the loop is proposed in the present dissertation. The methodology is intended to be especially suitable for application to flight vehicles exhibiting non-conventional dynamics characteristics and for which quantitative handling qualities specifications might not be available. The design objectives are introduced via correlation between pilot ratings and the objective function of the optimal control model of the human pilot. Since both human and augmentation controllers must be compatible and operate in parallel, simultaneous optimization for augmentation and pilot gains is required. The method is used for the implementation of a control system for the AFTI/F-16 aircraft in a pitch tracking task and experimentally verified and validated via fixed base simulation to show its capability of improving the dynamic characteristics of the vehicle