Flight control design for a highly flexible flutter demonstrator

Abstract

The paper presents the control design approaches for the European research project FLEXOP. The ultimate goal is to develop and apply active flutter suppression and load alleviation techniques on an unmanned flying aircraft demonstrator. Due to the flexible wing of the aircraft new challenges rise for the control design: the traditional rigid body (baseline) control loops have to be augmented with flutter control laws. In our approach, the controllers are designed based on a dynamical model, which is briefly discussed first. Details of the baseline control design, as well as the two different flutter suppression algorithms are discussed in the paper. Hardware-in-the-Loop testing of the controllers are reported before the first test flights of the aircraft.