Stability and Robustness Analysis and Improvements for Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Control

Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) is a variation on nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI), retaining the high-performance characteristics, while reducing model dependency and increasing robustness. After a successful flight test with a multirotor micro aerial vehicle, the question arises whether this technique can be used to successfully design a flight control system for aircraft in general. This requires additional research on aircraft characteristics that could cause issues related to the stability and performance of the INDI controller. Typical characteristics are additional time delays due to data buses and measurement systems, slower actuator and sensor dynamics, and a lower control frequency. The main contributions of this article are 1) an analytical stability analysis showing that implementing discrete-time INDI with a sampling time smaller than 0.02s results in large stability margins regarding system characteristics and controller gains; 2) a simulation study showing significant performance degradation requiring controller adaptation due to actuator measurement bias, angular rate measurement noise, angular rate measurement delay and actuator measurement delay; and 3) the use of a real-time time delay identification algorithm based on latency to successfully synchronize the angular rate and actuator measurement delay together with pseudo control hedging (PCH) to prevent oscillatory behavior.