Stability and Performance Analysis for SISO Incremental Flight Control

Abstract: Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) control has attracted increasing research attention for it retains the high-performance of NDI and has enhanced robustness. However, when actual elements of the flight control system and real-world phenomena (such as actuator dynamics, sensor noise, time delay, etc.) are considered, the INDI control may have degraded performance or even lose stability. This paper analyzed the stability and performance of an incremental controller for a SISO linear plant based on transfer functions. Besides, the theoretical analysis results are verified through numerical evaluations for the incremental controller of the short-period aircraft model using comprehensive metrics.