Abstract
Aircraft upsets are a major cause of fatalities in civil aviation. Unfortunately, recovery from upset scenarios is challenging due to the combination of nonlinearities, actuator limits, and upset modes. In this paper, we consider the use of Model-Predictive Control (MPC) in combination with a recently proposed piecewise polynomial prediction model, for six degree-of-freedom upset recovery. MPC naturally handles nonlinearities and constraints and has a provably large closed-loop region of attraction making it an appealing methodology for upset recovery problems. We present a recovery formulation then illustrate its utility through high fidelity simulation case studies, using the Generic Transport Model, of recovery from oscillatory spin and steep spiral upset conditions.