Sensitivity of Robust Flutter Suppression to Control Design Specifications

This paper describes the design of the robust flutter suppression controller for the Active Aeroelastic Aircraft Testbed-a flying-wing UAV platform designed for aeroelastic studies and the development of aeroelastic control technologies, developed at Technion Israel Institute of Technology. In particular, this study focuses on the parametric sensitivity of the flutter suppression to the tuning parameters of the H_∞ robust controller. The design is centered around the formulation of a generalized plant, in which dynamic components, in the form of weighted signals, are introduced to account for physical considerations of performance, perturbations, and limitations of the controller. Design parameters are added to the generalized plant to form a tunable robust flutter suppression controller synthesis framework. Finally, nonlinear criteria for quantifying the controller performance are defined. The study shows that while a design with nominal physical parameters can provide good performance, significant enhancement can be obtained by additional simple parametric tuning.