The FlightControl library for aircraft control design applications

Abstract

Controller development of aerial vehicles is along-standing task during aircraft design and has a largeimpact on the resulting systems performance. In today'sintegrated design loops, ideally all components of theaircraft must be considered in simulation and testing inorder to develop complex system architectures and meetperformance requirements. One of the tools that are suitedfor modeling and simulation of a multidisciplinary aircraftand systems assembly is DLR's FlightDynamics Library, whichtakes advantage of the capabilities of the Modelicamodeling language. In this work, a new augmentation to thelibrary is discussed, which implements a range of commonaircraft control concepts which can be used for design ofnew controllers, closed-loop simulation and experimentaltesting via code-export. The library is set up in a modularway, so that flight guidance and flight control systems canbe developed for multiple aerial platforms, includingmanned/unmanned fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. For thispaper, a simulation example is provided by means of anautoland controller that shall be designed for ahigh-fidelity 6-DoF fixed-wing aircraft model in Modelica.The combination of aircraft and controller models issubjected to a three step synthesis process, which yields acontroller that is robust against external and internaldisturbances.