document

Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control of the Flying V

Völker, Willem (author)

Recent research on the Flying V - a flying-wing long-range passenger aircraft - shows that its airframe design is 25% more aerodynamically efficient than a conventional tube-and-wing airframe. The Flying V is therefore a promising contribution towards reduction in climate impact of long-haul flights. However, some design aspects of the Flying V...

master thesis 2022

document

Modelling, Control, and Handling Quality Analysis of the Flying-V

van Overeem, Simon (author)

Over the last five decades, the majority of commercial aircraft consisted of the traditional tube-and-wing configuration. This traditional configuration is approaching a fuel efficiency asymptote. Besides that, with the increasing number of passengers and cargo transported by air every year, and environmental impact as an important factor in...

master thesis 2022

document

Incremental nonlinear control allocation for an aircraft with distributed electric propulsion: An application to the scaled flight demonstrator

de Heer, Pepijn (author)

To meet the demanding requirements on the environmental impact of aircraft, radically new aircraft concepts need to be developed. Within the NOVAIR project, Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) tests these new concepts on a Scaled flight demonstrator (SFD). Using an SFD allows for testing of dynamic and flight physical behavior of new...

master thesis 2021

document

Model Predictive Control for Helicopter Flight Control: Evaluating Linear and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Reducing Cross-coupling Effects in Helicopter Flight

Wellens, Lotte (author)

Model predictive control is an optimal, model-based control method that has the powerful capability of directly including input and output constraints. Next to this, it is known that helicopters are hard to fly with its complex, unstable and highly coupled dynamics. With the introduction of the concept of handling qualities, guidelines for...

master thesis 2021

document

Adaptive Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion for Consistent Pitch Rate Control

Smit, Beau (author)

Control augmentation systems based on Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) are able to provide high-performance nonlinear control without the need for a model of the complete system. Considering a pitch rate control law for a fixed-wing aircraft, only a model for the elevator control effectiveness (CE) and sensor feedback of the pitch...

master thesis 2021

document

Safe Curriculum Learning for Linear Systems With Unknown Dynamics in Primary Flight Control

De Buysscher, Diego (author)

Safe Curriculum Learning constitutes a collection of methods that aim at enabling Rein- forcement Learning (RL) algorithms on complex systems and tasks whilst considering the safety and efficiency aspect of the learning process. On the one hand, curricular reinforce- ment learning approaches divide the task into more gradual complexity stages to...

master thesis 2021

document

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

de Jong, Chris P.L. (author), Remes, B.D.W. (author), Hwang, S. (author), de Wagter, C. (author)

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...

journal article 2021

document

Autonomous Flying With Neuromorphic Sensing

Parlevliet, Patricia P. (author), Kanaev, Andrey (author), Hung, Chou P. (author), Schweiger, Andreas (author), Gregory, Frederick D. (author), Benosman, Ryad (author), de Croon, G.C.H.E. (author), Gutfreund, Yoram (author), Lo, Chung Chuan (author), Moss, Cynthia F. (author)

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...

journal article 2021

document

Artificial Potential Fields for Safe Reinforcement Learning: in Flight Control Systems

Miloševiċ, Stevan (author)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have become a topic of interest for performing guidance and navigation tasks, due to potential adaptability and autonomy improvements within dynamic systems. Nevertheless, a core component of RL is an agent exploring the environment it finds itself in, resulting in an intrinsic violation of the agent's safety....

master thesis 2020

document

Flight Control Design Using Hybrid Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Kumtepe, Yagiz (author)

Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control strategy, which has shown robustness against model uncertainties on various aerospace vehicles. The sensor-based nature of the method brings attractive properties which has made it popular in the last decade. INDI globally linearizes the system by making use of control...

master thesis 2020

document

Sample-efficient reinforcement learning for quadcopter flight control

Koomen, Lenard (author)

The combination of reinforcement learning and deep neural networks has the potential to train intelligent autonomous agents on high dimensional sensory inputs, with applications in flight control. However, the amount of samples needed by these methods is often too large to use real-world interaction. In this work, mirror-descent guided policy...

master thesis 2020

document

Never Landing Drone

de Jong, C.P.L. (author)

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. Simulatory results have shown the conditions that the flight controller can fly in.<br/>The effect of a change in wind...

master thesis 2020

document

Safe Curriculum Learning for Primary Flight Control

Pollack, Tijmen (author)

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the autonomous formation of optimal, adaptive control laws for systems with complex, uncertain dynamics. This process generally requires a learning agent to directly interact with the system in an online fashion. However, if the system is safety-critical, such as an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), learning may...

master thesis 2019

document

Coupled Flight Dynamic and Unsteady Aeroservoelastic Modeling and Control of a Flexible Wing Aircraft

Tal, E.A. (author)

Recent developments in airframe design include the increasing application of modern lightweight materials. Airframe designs based on composite materials are able to provide sufficient structural strength at lower mass, but often have decreased structural rigidity. Flight vehicles with relatively flexible structures exhibit more prominent...

master thesis 2015

document

Adaptive Incremental Backstepping Flight Control

Van Gils, P. (author)

This thesis deals with the development of Adaptive Incremental Backstepping control laws for a high-performance aircraft model (F-16), in order to make the airplane robustly seek references in roll rate and angle of attack at a constant airspeed while minimizing sideslip. An Incremental Backstepping scheme that relies on estimates of the angular...

master thesis 2015

document

Fault-Tolerant Flight Control with Sensor-Based Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

Tang, S.H. (author)

A worldwide civil aviation accident survey for the period of 2002 till 2011, conducted by the CAA-UK shows that in this time period nearly 40% of all the aircraft accidents involved loss of control. Despite the fatal outcomes, reconfigurable flight control might have been able to recover the aircraft by efficiently utilizing the remaining...

master thesis 2014

document

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

Sun, L.G. (author), De Visser, C.C. (author), Chu, Q.P. (author), Falkena, W. (author)

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...

journal article 2013

document

Adaptive Backstepping Flight Control for Modern Fighter Aircraft

Sonneveldt, L. (author)

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...

doctoral thesis 2010

document

An Integrated Approach to Aircraft Modelling and Flight Control Law Design

Looye, G.H.N. (author)

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...

doctoral thesis 2008

document

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

Barrett, R. (author), Vos, R. (author), De Breuker, R. (author)

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...

conference paper 2007