Theoretical Stability Analysis of Simple Adaptive Control for a Winged Re-Entry Vehicle

What is it about?

This paper continues the study of a Model Reference Adaptive Guidance implementation to the tracking of the trajectory of a winged re-entry vehicle, as well as a Model Reference Adaptive Control implementation for maintaining closed-loop stability. This design makes use of Simple Adaptive Control theory, which aims at tracking the output of a reference model. Although the tests show good results, the paper attempts to analyze the eventual satisfaction of customary sufficient passivity that could guarantee the robust stability of the adaptive control system beyond those operational conditions that can be simulated or tested. Therefore, along with simulation results, the paper explores ways for analysis of passivity conditions in a very large nonlinear plant. As the analysis shows that the plant does not satisfy the sufficient passivity conditions, ways to fulfill those conditions are proposed through the use of parallel feedforward.

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