Non-fragile H∞ flight controller design for large bank-angle tracking manoeuvres

Abstract This paper is concerned with the design of non-fragile H∞ output feedback control of a high-performance aircraft similar to F-16 in executing a large bank-angle tracking manoeuvre. The non-fragile H∞ flight controllers are designed to tolerate multiplicative gain variations in the controller matrices. The designs are based on three linear trim models of the high-performance aircraft. From the linear and non-linear simulations, the results show that the resulting closed-loop systems using the non-fragile H∞ flight controllers are robustly stable and have H∞ disturbance attenuation bounds with respect to some admissible controller gain variations. Corresponding performance comparisons with the standard robust design approach show that the resulting closed-loop systems using the standard H∞ flight controllers are unstable under the same controller gain variations.