Adaptive and quasi-sliding control of shimmy in landing gears

Shimmy is a dangerous phenomenon that occurs when aircraft’s nose landing gears oscillate in a rapid and uncontrollable fashion. In this paper, we propose the use of two nonlinear control approaches (zero average control and model reference adaptive control based on minimal control synthesis) as simple yet effective strategies to suppress undesired oscillations, even in the presence of uncertainties and partial state measurements. Numerical results are presented to validate the proposed control approaches.