Flight Control Experiment of Multipurpose-Aviation-Laboratory-alpha In-Flight Simulator

This paper reports the results of experimental verification of flight controllers for the multipurpose-aviation-laboratory-alpha (MuPAL-alpha) in-flight simulator. The flight controller design requirements are twofold: to suppress the effects of gusts on MuPAL-alpha motions and to realize a wide range of maneuverability, i.e., handling characteristics, without controller redesign. Using a previously proposed two-step design method for two-degrees-of-freedom model-matching controllers, flight controllers were designed for the linearized longitudinal and lateral-directional motions of MuPAL-alpha, and their performance was examined by hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight tests with several maneuverability models. These experiments confirmed that MuPAL-alpha with our controllers achieves gust suppression and is capable of simulating various types of handling characteristics simply by replacing the model that defines the characteristics to be examined.