Experimental validation of landing-gear dynamics for anti-skid control design

Aircraft control systems are in general difficult to test in their final deployment phases, as flight time has very high costs and entails possible dangerous working conditions. Thus, coming to test flights with control algorithms that have been thoroughly tested beforehand is paramount. As far an anti-skid control is concerned, the industrial practice is to have the anti-skid controller embedded in the landing gear, so that the initial test bench for controller design is a rig comprising all or parts of the landing gear system. In this work, we extend a previously designed dynamic model of the landing gear with the experimental characterization of the hydraulic braking system. Then, a test-rig is setup, which allows testing the contact between wheel and ground with a flywheel. Open-loop experiments to tune the simulator are conducted, and a final validation of the simulation model against experimental data is carried out.