UC San Diego

Extensive effort in controller design of aircraft systems is invested in robustness to ensure safe, stable behavior. Particular attention is placed on anomalous flight-conditions harbored by the atmosphere, especially icing. The thesis presents a regulation trigger-based adaptive controller to cope mathematically with the impact of ice on the aircraft equations of motion and control the aircraft pitch to the commanded angle. Upon an introduction to the problem, a pitch model of an aircraft system is derived, where the impact of icing is modeled. The design of a stabilizing certainty-equivalence controller utilizing backstepping follows, and is succeeded by the introduction of the Batch Least-Squares Identifier (BaLSI). Finally, simulation results of an aircraft experiencing icing demonstrates the effectiveness of the identifier, with the trajectory of the iced system utilizing the proposed identifier closely following that of the nominal system.