Robust adaptive flight control systems in the presence of time delay

Abstract

Adaptive control technology is a promising candidate to deliver high performance in aircraft systems in the presence of uncertainties. Currently, there is a lack of robustness guarantees against time delay with the difficulty arising from the fact that the underlying problem is nonlinear and time varying. Existing results for this problem have been quite limited, with most results either being local or at best, semi-global. In this thesis, robust adaptive control for a class of plants with global boundedness in the presence of time-delay is established. This class of plants pertains to linear systems whose states are accessible. The global boundedness is accomplished using a standard adaptive control law with a projection algorithm for a range of non-zero delays. The upper bound of such delays, i.e. the delay margin, is explicitly computed. The results of this thesis provide a highly desirable fundamental property of adaptive control, robustness to time-delays, a necessary step towards developing theoretically verifiable flight control systems.