Swarm Optimized Pitch Angle Controller for an Aircraft

Abstract: The flight dynamics are non linear, time invariant and uncertain, hence the flight dynamics are linearized at some flight conditions and thus flight control systems are designed by using these linearized mathematical models. These linearized mathematical models can be controlled by using nonlinear controllers. The principal objective of this paper is to design a Swarm Optimized Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller for a non linear pitch control system to obtain the desired pitch angle as commanded by the pilot while manoeuvring a Delta Aircraft (four engine very large cargo jet aircraft). Here the Bacterial Foraging Optimization is applied as offline to optimize the PID controller. A fine tuned PID controller (particle Swarm Optimization based) i.e. PSOPID and a neural controller are designed to compare and establish the superiority of our proposed system. It is further established that BFOPID controller provides better performance in comparison with Radial Basis function Neural Controller (RBFNC) and PSOPID controller in terms of early settling time and overshoot.