Optimal Input Design for Flight Vehicle System Identification in Frequency Domain

Designing the experiments is one of the most important aspects of any system identification and parameter estimation project. The importance of experiment design is even more pronounced in flight vehicle system identification, as performing the experiments, i.e. flight tests is costly. In this work, we present a novel approach for designing optimal inputs for parameter estimation in frequency domain using the direct method for optimal control. We investigate the developed method by means of the optimal control theory and provide numerical results. The approach presented here allows for maximizing the information content in the acquired data during the experiment for a specific frequency band.