Incremental nonlinear control of hydraulic parallel robots: An application to the SIMONA research simulator

In advanced robotic applications such as robotic locomotion, vehicle and flight simulators, and material test devices, there are higher requirements on stiffness, robustness and power ability for the mechanical structure and the actuator. Hence, it is common for such applications to use parallel manipulators and hydraulic actuators, due to their...

Propulsion System Effects on the Controllability of a Second-Stage Spaceplane

Spaceplanes are the future of space travel and launching objects into space. They are fully reusable, and provide a lot of flexibility to a mission. This thesis focuses on the propulsion system and its impact on the stability and control of a spaceplane. The main research question is: "Which parameters and deficiencies in the propulsion system...

Quadrotor Fault Tolerant Incremental Sliding Mode Control driven by Sliding Mode Disturbance Observers

This paper proposes an Incremental Sliding Mode Control driven by Sliding Mode Disturbance Observers (INDI-SMC/SMDO), with application to a quadrotor fault tolerant control problem. By designing the SMC/SMDO based on the control structure of the sensor-based Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI), instead of the model-based Nonlinear...

Incremental Control of Hybrid Micro Air Vehicles

Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) can perform many useful tasks, such as mapping and delivery. For these tasks either rotorcraft are used, which can hover but are not very efficient, or fixed wing vehicles, which are efficient but can not hover. Hybrid MAVs combine the hovering of a rotorcraft with the efficiency of a fixed wing. The reason that these...

Robust Stability Augmentation of a Le Mans Prototype 1 race car using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

In this paper incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion, a sensor based approximate form of feedback linearization with favorable robustness properties, is applied to the traction control and stability augmentation problem of a Le Mans Prototype 1 race car. A cascaded side-slip and yaw-rate envelope protection system is developed in combination...

Vector Field Based Path Following for UAVs using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

This work presents a vector field based path following method to be used by Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The desired path to be followed is a smooth planar path defined in its implicit form. The vector field around the desired path is then constructed using the implicit function, such that the integral curves of the vector field...

Multivariate Spline-Based Adaptive Control for High Performance Aircraft in Atmospheric Turbulence

In existing modular adaptive control approaches, the effects of external disturbances such as atmospheric turbulence are often not considered. In real-life flight applications, stochastic atmospheric disturbances can severely degrade the performance of these approaches, resulting in undesired and unpredictable control behavior. In this thesis,...

Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion Flight Control: Stability and Robustness Analysis and Improvements

Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a variation on Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) retaining the high-performance advantages of NDI, while increasing controller robustness to model uncertainties and decreasing the dependency on the vehicle model. After a successful flight test with a multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV), the...

Aircraft Fault-Tolerant Trajectory Control Using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

This paper deals with aircraft trajectory control in the presence of model uncertainties and actuator faults. Existing approaches, such as adaptive backstepping and nonlinear dynamic inversion with online model identi_cation, can be applied. However, since there are a number of unknown aerodynamic derivatives, the tuning of parameter update law...

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

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...

Robust Nonlinear Spacecraft Attitude Control: An Incremental Backstepping Approach

In order to meet requirements in terms of robustness, stability, and performance for future generations of advanced attitude control systems, a sensor-based approach using Incremental Backstepping control is developed and proposed in this thesis. Assuming full state availability and fast control action, the resulting time-scale separation...

Helicopter nonlinear flight control: An acceleration measurements-based approach using incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion

Due to the inherent instabilities and nonlinearities of rotorcraft dynamics, its changing properties during flight and the difficulties to predict its aerodynamics with high levels of fidelity, helicopter flight control requires strategies that allow to cope with the nonlinearities of the model and assure robustness in the presence of...

Robust flight control using incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion and angular acceleration prediction

This paper presents a flight control strategy based on nonlinear dynamic inversion. The approach presented, called incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion, uses properties of general mechanical systems and nonlinear dynamic inversion by feeding back angular accelerations. Theoretically, feedback of angular accelerations eliminates sensitivity to...

Nonlinear Flight Control: Fault Tolerant Control with Sliding Modes and Control Allocation

Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) is a promising method for Fault Tolerant Flight Control. The NDI algorithm cancels out the aircraft dynamics based on a dynamic aircraft model such that the closed loop system behaves linearly. The aircraft model is estimated online, which allows it to accommodate changes in the aircraft configurations and...