The PVTOL aircraft

Abstract

Flight control is an essential control problem that appears in many applications such as spacecraft, aircraft and helicopters. The complete dynamics of an aircraft, taking into account aeroelastic effects, flexibility of the wings, internal dynamics of the engine and the multitude of changing variables, are quite complex and somewhat unmanageable for the purposes of control. It is also particularly interesting to consider a simplified aircraft, which has a minimum number of states and inputs but retains the main features that must be considered when designing control laws for a real aircraft. Therefore, as considered by Hauser et al. [35], we focus our study on the planar vertical take-off and landing (PVTOL) aircraft, which is a highly manoeuvrable jet aircraft.