Stabilization of a Pitch Axis Flight Control Experiment with Input Rate Saturation

Abstract

Motivated by some specific problems in flight control and roll stabilization of ships, we present a technique for stabilizing a chain of integrators in the presence of rate limitations on the input. Our technique improves on several existing techniques in the literature and has a number of interesting features. The controller is evaluated experimentally on a pitch axis flight control experiment at Caltech. The experimental results show that even in the presence of rate limits that cause a linear controller to go unstable, the time-varying controller stabilizes the system with minimal loss in performance.