Event-Triggered Output Regulation for Networked Flight Control System Based on an Asynchronous Switched System Approach

In this article, the event-triggered output regulation problem is investigated for a networked flight control system with a switched system approach. By properly scheduling triggered times of periodic sampling associated with continuous event-triggering and switching instants of each subsystem, an alternate event-triggered mechanism based on the subsystem model is proposed to transmit the triggered information to the candidate controller. Since the subsystem may switch between two adjacent events while the corresponding controller does not switch, asynchronous switching may occur. Meanwhile, an event-triggered switching signal caused by asynchronous switching is designed with the mode-dependent average dwell time approach and event-triggered instants. By constructing multiple Lyapunov functions in the framework of the input delay approach and designing an error feedback controller, the sufficient condition for event-triggered asynchronous output regulation problem is solved. Finally, the proposed methods are proved to be effective by the F-18 aircraft model.

I. Introduction

With the continuous development and maturity of aerospace technology, more and more aircraft adopt data bus technology to overcome the drawbacks of traditional point-to-point connection way, such as complex wiring, high maintenance cost, huge volume, and so on. Real-time networks, such as data bus are applied to connect sensors, controllers, and actuators of aircraft to form a closed-loop, which constitutes a networked flight control system (NFCS) [1], [2]. This solves the increasingly complex problem of data sharing and data transmission among the components of the system. Especially, for aircraft attitude control systems, the elevator, aileron, engine, and other components connected via network cooperate and communicate with each other to complete entire flight targets and better meet the requirements of aircraft intelligence and autonomy in the information age.