ABSTRACT
Laboratoire d ’Automatique, Mécatronique, Productique et Systémique Ecole Nationale d ’Ingenieurs, Technopôle Belfort, BP 525, 90016 Belfort Cedex, France
Physical phenomena and processes complexity of aircraft flight dynamics pose the problem of designing a highly reliable and high quality tracking controller under the existence of a great number of unknown nonlinearities and unpredictable disturbances (Blakelock [1], Etkin [2], Lane and Stengel [3], Stevens and Lewis [4]). Such high qualities are global elementwise exponential stability and/or tracking in the space o f the aircraft generalized coordinate vector Ө and its derivative. The elementwise properties enable different aircraft variables to have different and independent speeds of an exponential convergence to their desired values. The exponential convergence ensures a high and fast strict monotonous
attenuation of their errors. Another high qualities, which ensure an independent finite reachability time to the error of each of aircraft general variables and the error strict monotone convergence (i.e. without oscillations) to the origin, are global stability and global elementwise stablewise tracking both with finite vector reachability time.
