[wenc]

So I don't know the first thing about aircraft control, but I'm a control engineer by training.

What control scheme do aircraft use today? I always thought it was a form of MPC (well GPC = generalized predictive control) with a state estimator like a linear Kalman filter.

[spaceandshit]

Are you familiar with DO-178? Basically outputs have to be deterministic.. so you can't really use advanced control techniques.

I haven't worked on flight control (but control on specific aircraft systems, which are at the same level), and they're all basically PID control thrown together.

[wenc]

Ah no, aircraft control is outside of my province, so this is new knowledge.

Advanced control can be deterministic -- through parameterization. Explicit MPC [1] does this. It pre-computes the quadratic optimization problem offline, so all the solutions are enumerated and stored, and are verifiable. However, as far as I know no one has implemented this commercially.

Interesting that it's all PID. Not surprised though because PID is tried-and-true (but even so, has a lot of tiny nuances which takes years to understand).

[1] https://www.mathworks.com/help/mpc/explicit-mpc-design.html

[spaceandshit]

Thanks for the link, I was not familiar. I'm not sure if any current commercial systems use these methods. I know the defense industry uses a lot of advanced techniques because they're their own regulators.