Addressing Actuation Redundancies in Incremental Controllers for Attitude Tracking of Fixed-Wing Aircraft

Aircraft safety heavily depends on the flight control performance, which usually requires good model knowledge. Sensor-based controllers, known as incremental controllers, have been filling this gap by substituting state-only-dependent dynamics knowledge by accelerations measurements. However, these solutions have only dealt, so far, with generalized actuation, making the control allocation a posterior step to the control design. This paper explicitly considers actuation redundancies within the design of an Incremental Backstepping controller applied to the attitude tracking of an overactuated fixed-wing aircraft. A solution using the Monroe-Penrose Pseudo-inverse is proposed to allocate the control effort. A Washout filter is introduced to retrieve the trim solution during straight-and-level flight. The closed-loop performance is evaluated with a Boeing 747 aircraft simulation including possible actuation failures.