Autonomous Flying With Neuromorphic Sensing

Autonomous flight for large aircraft appears to be within our reach. However, launching autonomous systems for everyday missions still requires an immense interdisciplinary research effort supported by pointed policies and funding. We believe that concerted endeavors in the fields of neuroscience, mathematics, sensor physics, robotics, and...

Never landing drone: Autonomous soaring of a unmanned aerial vehicle in front of a moving obstacle

Increasing endurance is a major challenge for battery-powered aerial vehicles. A method is presented which makes use of an updraft around obstacles to decrease the power consumption of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. A soaring flight controller has been developed that can autonomously soar while the unmanned aerial vehicle keeps its...

A Hybrid Sensor Based Backstepping Control Approach with its Application to Fault-Tolerant Flight Control

Recently, an incremental type sensor based backstepping (SBB) control approach, based on singular perturbation theory and Tikhonov’s theorem, has been proposed. This Lyapunov function based method uses measurements of control variables and less model knowledge, and it is not susceptible to the model uncertainty caused by fault scenarios. In this...

Adaptive Backstepping Flight Control for Modern Fighter Aircraft

The main goal of this thesis is to investigate the potential of the nonlinear adaptive backstepping control technique in combination with online model identification for the design of a reconfigurable flight control system for a modern fighter aircraft. Adaptive backstepping is a recursive, Lyapunov-based, nonlinear design method, that makes use...

An Integrated Approach to Aircraft Modelling and Flight Control Law Design

The design of flight control laws (FCLs) for automatic and manual (augmented) control of aircraft is a complicated task. FCLs have to fulfil large amounts of performance criteria and must work reliably in all flight conditions, for all aircraft configurations, and in adverse weather conditions. Consequently, a large part of the FCL design...

Post-buckled precompressed (PBP) subsonic micro flight control actuators and surfaces

This paper describes a new class of flight control actuators using Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements to provide much improved actuator performance. These PBP actuator elements are modeled using basic large deflection Euler-beam estimations accounting for laminated plate effects. The deflection estimations are then coupled...

Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric actuators for UAV flight control

This paper presents the use of a new class of flight control actuators employing Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements in morphing wing Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The new actuator relieson axial compression to amplify deflections and control forces simultaneously. Two designs employing morphingwing panels based on PBP...

Post-buckled precompressed (PBP) elements: A new class of flight control actuators enhancing high-speed autonomous VTOL MAVs

This paper describes a new class of flight control actuators using Post-Buckled Precompressed (PBP) piezoelectric elements. These actuators are designed to produce significantly higher deflection and force levels than conventional piezoelectric actuator elements. Classical laminate plate theory (CLPT) models are shown to work very well in...

Adaptive aerostructures: The first decade of flight on uninhabited aerial vehicles

Although many subscale aircraft regularly fly with adaptive materials in sensors and small components in secondary subsystems, only a handful have flown with adaptive aerostructures as flight critical, enabling components. This paper reviews several families of adaptive aerostructures which have enabled or significantly enhanced flightworthy...

Design and testing of piezoelectric flight control actuators for hard-launch munitions

A new technique is presented for designing actuators for guided hard-launch adaptive munitions by using actuator and substrate strain limits, static analysis methods and matching the local actuator strains along its length by varying the width. This Load-Matched design technique leads to an exponential area distribution as a function of length...

Application of distributed artificial intelligence in complex modular critical applications

This report provides an overview of the emerging technology Distributed Artificial Intelligence, in particular in the area of Distributed Problem Solving (DPS). DPS refers to coarse-grained (task-level) problem decomposition resulting in a number of expert or knowledge-based systems, generally called agents of which each exhibits some...

Reliability aspects of software for digital avionics

Modern commercial transport aircraft contain digital avionics systems for more and more safety critical functions. The reliability and safety of those new systems depend on the hardware reliability and on the reliability of the embedded software. In this report, an overview is given of available methods and techniques to develop reliable...

Human monitoring and control behaviour models and experiments

This report deals with a theoretical and experimental program concerning human monitoring and and control behaviour. A model for multivariable monitoring (an automatic approach) was tested against experimental data. Apart from monitoring, simultaneously monitoring and manual flight director control was studied to determine the interference...

Human control and monitoring-models and experiments

This paper deals with the resiilts of a theoretical and experimental program concerning human monitoring behavior. Apart from monitoring an automatic approach combined monitoring and manual flight director control was studied to determine the interference between subtasks. Also simultaneously monitoring and auditory tracking was included. The...