Evolution Assisted Flight Control System Design

An evolution driven controller design approach has beenapplied to a rigid body aircraft model of a lightsport aircraft. The model comprises inertial, aerodynamic and flightdynamics related elements with the controller architecture based on ClassicalControl Theory. The evolution driven concept has played a significant role inthe optimization of the proposed controller structure by providing tunedcontroller parameters, which meet the designed fitness function criteriaimposed through the optimization problem formulation. The proposed fitnessfunction combines significant controller stability evaluation conditions into asingle abstraction. The use of a robust optimization framework based on thegenetic algorithms has allowed the suggested form of multi-criteriaoptimization definition. The suitability of the evolutionary optimization hasbeen successfully tested on a model with rigid body aircraft dynamics.Time-domain simulation results have shown the compliance of the tunedcontroller performance with its anticipated behavior.