1,175 research outputs found
Optimised configuration of sensing elements for control and fault tolerance applied to an electro-magnetic suspension system
New technological advances and the requirements to increasingly abide
by new safety laws in engineering design projects highly affects industrial
products in areas such as automotive, aerospace and railway industries.
The necessity arises to design reduced-cost hi-tech products with minimal
complexity, optimal performance, effective parameter robustness properties,
and high reliability with fault tolerance. In this context the control system
design plays an important role and the impact is crucial relative to the level
of cost efficiency of a product.
Measurement of required information for the operation of the design
control system in any product is a vital issue, and in such cases a number of
sensors can be available to select from in order to achieve the desired system
properties. However, for a complex engineering system a manual procedure
to select the best sensor set subject to the desired system properties can
be very complicated, time consuming or even impossible to achieve. This is
more evident in the case of large number of sensors and the requirement to
comply with optimum performance.
The thesis describes a comprehensive study of sensor selection for control
and fault tolerance with the particular application of an ElectroMagnetic
Levitation system (being an unstable, nonlinear, safety-critical system with
non-trivial control performance requirements). The particular aim of the
presented work is to identify effective sensor selection frameworks subject to
given system properties for controlling (with a level of fault tolerance) the
MagLev suspension system. A particular objective of the work is to identify
the minimum possible sensors that can be used to cover multiple sensor faults,
while maintaining optimum performance with the remaining sensors.
The tools employed combine modern control strategies and multiobjective
constraint optimisation (for tuning purposes) methods. An important part
of the work is the design and construction of a 25kg MagLev suspension
to be used for experimental verification of the proposed sensor selection
frameworks
Distributionally Robust LQG control under Distributed Uncertainty
A new paradigm is proposed for the robustification of the LQG controller
against distributional uncertainties on the noise process. Our controller
optimizes the closed-loop performances in the worst possible scenario under the
constraint that the noise distributional aberrance does not exceed a certain
threshold limiting the relative entropy pseudo-distance between the actual
noise distribution the nominal one. The main novelty is that the bounds on the
distributional aberrance can be arbitrarily distributed along the whole
disturbance trajectory. We discuss why this can, in principle, be a substantial
advantage and we provide simulation results that substantiate such a principle
High performance, accelerometer-based control of the Mini-MAST structure at Langley Research Center
Many large space system concepts will require active vibration control to satisfy critical performance requirements such as line of sight pointing accuracy and constraints on rms surface roughness. In order for these concepts to become operational, it is imperative that the benefits of active vibration control be shown to be practical in ground based experiments. The results of an experiment shows the successful application of the Maximum Entropy/Optimal Projection control design methodology to active vibration control for a flexible structure. The testbed is the Mini-Mast structure at NASA-Langley and has features dynamically traceable to future space systems. To maximize traceability to real flight systems, the controllers were designed and implemented using sensors (four accelerometers and one rate gyro) that are actually mounted to the structure. Ground mounted displacement sensors that could greatly ease the control design task were available but were used only for performance evaluation. The use of the accelerometers increased the potential of destabilizing the system due to spillover effects and motivated the use of precompensation strategy to achieve sufficient compensator roll-off
Active vibration control techniques for flexible space structures
Two proposed control system design techniques for active vibration control in flexible space structures are detailed. Control issues relevant only to flexible-body dynamics are addressed, whereas no attempt was made to integrate the flexible and rigid-body spacecraft dynamics. Both of the proposed approaches revealed encouraging results; however, further investigation of the interaction of the flexible and rigid-body dynamics is warranted
Final report on robust stochastic adaptive control
Includes bibliographical references.Supported by the Office of Naval Research under contract N00014-82-K-0582 NR606-003 MIT OSP no.92775prepared by Lena Valavani, Michael Athans ; submitted to Office of Naval Research, Mathematical Sciences Division
Control and structural optimization for maneuvering large spacecraft
Presented here are the results of an advanced control design as well as a discussion of the requirements for automating both the structures and control design efforts for maneuvering a large spacecraft. The advanced control application addresses a general three dimensional slewing problem, and is applied to a large geostationary platform. The platform consists of two flexible antennas attached to the ends of a flexible truss. The control strategy involves an open-loop rigid body control profile which is derived from a nonlinear optimal control problem and provides the main control effort. A perturbation feedback control reduces the response due to the flexibility of the structure. Results are shown which demonstrate the usefulness of the approach. Software issues are considered for developing an integrated structures and control design environment
Stanford Aerospace Research Laboratory research overview
Over the last ten years, the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory (ARL) has developed a hardware facility in which a number of space robotics issues have been, and continue to be, addressed. This paper reviews two of the current ARL research areas: navigation and control of free flying space robots, and modelling and control of extremely flexible space structures. The ARL has designed and built several semi-autonomous free-flying robots that perform numerous tasks in a zero-gravity, drag-free, two-dimensional environment. It is envisioned that future generations of these robots will be part of a human-robot team, in which the robots will operate under the task-level commands of astronauts. To make this possible, the ARL has developed a graphical user interface (GUI) with an intuitive object-level motion-direction capability. Using this interface, the ARL has demonstrated autonomous navigation, intercept and capture of moving and spinning objects, object transport, multiple-robot cooperative manipulation, and simple assemblies from both free-flying and fixed bases. The ARL has also built a number of experimental test beds on which the modelling and control of flexible manipulators has been studied. Early ARL experiments in this arena demonstrated for the first time the capability to control the end-point position of both single-link and multi-link flexible manipulators using end-point sensing. Building on these accomplishments, the ARL has been able to control payloads with unknown dynamics at the end of a flexible manipulator, and to achieve high-performance control of a multi-link flexible manipulator
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