Experimental Validation of an Adaptive Total Energy Control System Strategy for the Longitudinal Dynamics of a Fixed-Wing Aircraft

AbstractThis paper presents the experimental validation of an adaptive total energy control strategy to regulating the airspeed and the flight path angle of a fixed-wing aircraft. The control strategy is developed from a nonlinear description of the total energy control system approach. An open source computational fluid dynamics software is used to estimate the aerodynamic characteristics of the experimental aircraft. The stability properties are analyzed considering the linearized closed-loop dynamics around an equilibrium point.

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