Probabilistic Robustness Analysis of F- 16 Controller Performance: An Optimal Transport Approach

Abstract: This paper presents an optimal transport theoretic formulation to assess the controller robustness for F-16 aircraft. We compare the state regulation performance for a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) and gain scheduled LQR (gsLQR), applied to nonlinear longitudinal open-loop dynamics of F-16, under stochastic initial condition uncertainty. It is shown that both controllers have comparable immediate and asymptotic performance, but gsLQR achieves better transient performance than LQR. Algorithms based on Perron-Frobenius operator, are given for tractable computation. Numerical results from the proposed method, are in unison with Monte Carlo simulations.