Limits of performance of a tailless fighter in the presence of saturation

In this paper, the authors apply l(1)-based methods to the pitch control of a Tail-less Advanced Fighter Aircraft (TAFA) developed by Boeing St. Louis , to directly and accurately assess the fundamental trade-offs between perf ormance limits and saturation position and rate constraints. Linear input-o utput and nonlinear state-space design techniques are utilized. Although th e nonlinear methods are computationally significantly more complex, they of fer flexibility to accurately address performance in the presence of broade r classes of constraints such as nonsymmetric saturation levels.