A hybrid switched mode control approach for V/STOL flight control problems

We study two flight control problems for the standard planar V/STOL (vertical/short take off and landing) flight control model. Stabilization and tracking objectives are difficult to achieve since the model is known to be nonminimum phase, i.e. for outputs of interest there are unstable zero dynamics. A class of nonlinear hybrid feedback controllers, switching between members of a family of piecewise constant functions, is introduced; switching logic is defined that guarantees satisfaction of the desired control objectives. We show that this hybrid control approach is effective for these problems.