Autonomous Guidance and Control for Precision Landing on Planetary Bodies: Convex Optimization Approach For Mars and Titan Case Studies

Autonomously landing a spacecraft on the surface of a planetary body with a degree of precision in the order of meters is highly challenging. Over the course of time, the landing ellipse, defined as the region with a 99% likelihood of where a space vehicle will land, has improved steadily but currently still has dimensions in the order of...

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Model-Free Flight Control: A sample efficient tabular approach using Q(lambda)-learning and options in a traditional flight control structure

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a model-free adaptive approach to learn a non-linear control law for flight control. However, for flat-RL (FRL) the size of the search space grows exponentially with the number of states, resulting in low sample efficiency. This research aims to improve the efficiency with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL)....

Modeling and Control of a Solid State Transformer and verification with Controller Hardware in the Loop

Climate change is driving the evolving energy mix in the world. The amount of renewables are rising to avoid the detrimental effects of fossil fuels to the environment. Solar and wind power are the major players in the rising renewable energy mix. Most of these power generation sources are interfaced through power electronic converters. In the...

Integrated Control System for Frequency and Voltage Support via Type-3 Wind Turbines equipped with Energy Storage System

During previous centuries, humanity had relied on fossil fuels to generate the demanded energy. Nowadays, the extensive use of oil, gas and coal for energy production is becoming a major problem which concerns modern society. Global warming and climate change are the biggest challenges the scientific community has faced. The main factor which...

Simulation Study on the Active Motion Compensation of an Offshore Gangway

During offshore installations in harsh sea conditions, the involved gangway system must satisfy rigorous requirements in terms of safety and accuracy. The forces resulting from the vessel motion have an extensive effect on the overall gangway structure and its lifetime. Moreover, vessel motion handicaps the operator during fine positioning of...

Analysis of Skill Development in Manual Ramp Tracking Tasks: Using a Feedforward Pilot Model

A study is performed analyzing the behavioral adaptation of pilots in skill based ramp tracking tasks performed with pursuit display. From data analyses of previous ramp tracking experiments an indication is found that pilots who repeatedly perform the same ramp tracking task show a high level of adaptation to characteristics of the control task...