Application of higher order derivatives in aircraft flight control

This paper presents the design of continuous-time controller based on the higher order output derivatives in the feedback loop. The problem of forming desired output transients for nonlinear time-varying plants under conditions of the incomplete information is discussed. The Dynamic Contraction Method is presented where derivative state vector feedback is used. The control task is formulated as a tracking problem for output variables, where decoupled output transients are accomplished in spite of incomplete information about varying parameters of the system and external disturbances. The proposed technique is tested by simulations of a few maneuvers for F-16 aircraft model.