Automatic Flight Control Systems

The history of flight control is inseparably linked to the history of aviation itself. Since the early days, the concept of automatic flight control systems has evolved from mechanical control systems to highly advanced automatic fly-by-wire flight control systems which can be found nowadays in military jets and civil airliners. Even today, many research efforts are made for the further development of these flight control systems in various aspects. Recent new developments in this field focus on a wealth of different aspects. This book focuses on a selection of key research areas, such as inertial navigation, control of unmanned aircraft and helicopters, trajectory control of an unmanned space re-entry vehicle, aeroservoelastic control, adaptive flight control, and fault tolerant flight control. This book consists of two major sections. The first section focuses on a literature review and some recent theoretical developments in flight control systems. The second section discusses some concepts of adaptive and fault-tolerant flight control systems. Each technique discussed in this book is illustrated by a relevant example

Identifying Position-Dependent Mechanical Systems: A Modal Approach Applied to a Flexible Wafer Stage

Increasingly stringent performance requirements for motion control necessitate the use of increasingly detailed models of the system behavior. Motion systems inherently move, therefore, spatio-temporal models of the flexible dynamics are essential. In this paper, a two-step approach for the identification of the spatio-temporal behavior of mechanical systems is developed and applied to a lightweight prototype industrial wafer stage. The proposed approach exploits a modal modeling framework and combines recently developed powerful linear time invariant (LTI) identification tools with a spline-based mode-shape interpolation approach to estimate the spatial system behavior. The experimental results for the wafer stage application confirm the suitability of the proposed approach for the identification of complex position-dependent mechanical systems, and its potential for motion control performance improvements