1,338 research outputs found
Performance Evaluation of a Prognostic Framework for Electro-Hydraulic Actuators for Stability Control Augmentation Systems with Different Sensors Suites
Stability Control Augmentation Systems (SCAS) are widely adopted to enhance the flight stability of rotary-wing aircraft operating in difficult aerodynamic conditions, such as low altitude missions, stationary flight nearby vertical walls or in presence of heavy gusts. Such systems are based upon small electro-hydraulic servosystems controlled in position through a dedicated servovalve. The SCAS operates with limited authority over the main control linkage translating the pilot input in the movement of the main flight control actuator. Being critical for the operability of the helicopter, the definition of a Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) framework for the SCAS systems would provide significant advantages, such as better risk mitigation, improved availability, and a reduction in the occurrences of unpredicted failures which still represent one of the most known downsides of helicopters due to their very severe operational environment. Since SCAS actuators are usually equipped with a low number of sensors, it is at the present time unclear whether a fully realized PHM system can be prepared without resorting to the introduction of additional sensors. This paper deals with this subject evaluating the performances of a fault diagnosis tool operating considering different sensors suite (traditional and with additional sensors), and different PHM strategies, using in-flight data or their combination with dedicated pre-flight checks to cover the most common failure modes. The analysis is then completed with an evaluation of the prognostic capabilities of the proposed strategies, highlighting benefits and limitations of the proposed solutions
Fault Diagnosis and Fault-Tolerant Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
With the increasing demand for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in both military and civilian applications, critical safety issues need to be specially considered in order to make better and wider use of them. UAVs are usually employed to work in hazardous and complex environments, which may seriously threaten the safety and reliability of UAVs. Therefore, the safety and reliability of UAVs are becoming imperative for development of advanced intelligent control systems. The key challenge now is the lack of fully autonomous and reliable control techniques in face of different operation conditions and sophisticated environments. Further development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control systems is required to be reliable in the presence of system component faults and to be insensitive to model uncertainties and external environmental disturbances.
This thesis research aims to design and develop novel control schemes for UAVs with consideration of all the factors that may threaten their safety and reliability. A novel adaptive sliding mode control (SMC) strategy is proposed to accommodate model uncertainties and actuator faults for an unmanned quadrotor helicopter. Compared with the existing adaptive SMC strategies in the literature, the proposed adaptive scheme can tolerate larger actuator faults without stimulating control chattering due to the use of adaptation parameters in both continuous and discontinuous control parts. Furthermore, a fuzzy logic-based boundary layer and a nonlinear disturbance observer are synthesized to further improve the capability of the designed control scheme for tolerating model uncertainties, actuator faults, and unknown external disturbances while preventing overestimation of the adaptive control parameters and suppressing the control chattering effect. Then, a cost-effective fault estimation scheme with a parallel bank of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is proposed to accurately estimate actuator fault magnitude and an active fault-tolerant control (FTC) framework is established for a closed-loop quadrotor helicopter system. Finally, a reconfigurable control allocation approach is combined with adaptive SMC to achieve the capability of tolerating complete actuator failures with application to a modified octorotor helicopter. The significance of this proposed control scheme is that the stability of the closed-loop system is theoretically guaranteed in the presence of both single and simultaneous actuator faults
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
Design, Development and Implementation of Intelligent Algorithms to Increase Autonomy of Quadrotor Unmanned Missions
This thesis presents the development and implementation of intelligent algorithms to increase autonomy of unmanned missions for quadrotor type UAVs. A six-degree-of freedom dynamic model of a quadrotor is developed in Matlab/Simulink in order to support the design of control algorithms previous to real-time implementation. A dynamic inversion based control architecture is developed to minimize nonlinearities and improve robustness when the system is driven outside bounds of nominal design. The design and the implementation of the control laws are described. An immunity-based architecture is introduced for monitoring quadrotor health and its capabilities for detecting abnormal conditions are successfully demonstrated through flight testing. A vision-based navigation scheme is developed to enhance the quadrotor autonomy under GPS denied environments. An optical flow sensor and a laser range finder are used within an Extended Kalman Filter for position estimation and its estimation performance is analyzed by comparing against measurements from a GPS module. Flight testing results are presented where the performances are analyzed, showing a substantial increase of controllability and tracking when the developed algorithms are used under dynamically changing environments. Healthy flights, flights with failures, flight with GPS-denied navigation and post-failure recovery are presented
IVHM Related Research at NASA Glenn
The presentation summarizes Glenn Research center work in IVHM related areas. The focus is on the model-based engine control and diagnostics work being done at the Controls and Dynamics Branch
Artificial Immune System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Abnormal Condition Detection and Identification
A detection and identification scheme for abnormal conditions was developed for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based on the artificial immune system (AIS) paradigm. This technique involves establishing a body of data to represent normal conditions referred to as “self” and differentiating these conditions from abnormal conditions, referred to as “non-self”. Data collected from simulation of the UAV attempting to autonomously fly a pre-decided trajectory were used to develop and test a scheme that was able to detect and identify aircraft sensor and actuator faults. These faults included aerodynamic control surface locks and damages and angular rate sensor biases. The method used to create the AIS is known as the partition of the universe approach. This approach differs from standard clustering approaches because the universe is divided into uniform partition clusters rather than clustering data using some clustering algorithm. It is simpler and requires less computational resources. This will be the first time that this approach has been applied for use in aerospace engineering. Data collected from nominal flights were used to define self partitions, and the non-self partitions were defined implicitly. The creation scheme is also discussed, involving all software used for simulation, as well as the process of creating the self and the logic behind the detection and identification schemes. The detection scheme was evaluated based on detection rate, detection time, and false alarms for flights under both normal and abnormal conditions. The failure identification scheme was assessed in terms of identification rate and time. Investigation of the proposed technique showed promising results for the cases explored with comparable performance with respect to clustering-based approaches and motivates further research and extension of the proposed methodology toward a more complete health management system
Design of fault tolerant control system for individual blade control helicopters
This dissertation presents the development of a fault tolerant control scheme for helicopters fitted with individually controlled blades. This novel approach attempts to improve fault tolerant capabilities of helicopter control system by increasing control redundancy using additional actuators for individual blade input and software re-mixing to obtain nominal or close to nominal conditions under failure. An advanced interactive simulation environment has been developed including modeling of sensor failure, swashplate actuator failure, individual blade actuator failure, and blade delamination to support the design, testing, and evaluation of the control laws. This simulation environment is based on the blade element theory for the calculation of forces and moments generated by the main rotor. This discretized model allows for individual blade analysis, which in turn allows measuring the consequences of a stuck blade, or loss of the surface area of the blade itself, with respect to the dynamics of the whole helicopter. The control laws are based on non-linear dynamic inversion and artificial neural network augmentation, which is a mix of linear and nonlinear methods that compensates for model inaccuracies due to linearization or failure. A stability analysis based on the Lyapunov function approach has shown that bounded tracking error is guaranteed, and under specific circumstances, global stability is guaranteed as well. An analysis over the degrees of freedom of the mechanical system and its impact over the helicopter handling qualities is also performed to measure the degree of redundancy achieved with the addition of individual blade actuators as compared to a classic swashplate helicopter configuration. Mathematical analysis and numerical simulation, using reconfiguration of the individual blade control under failure have shown that this control architecture can potentially improve the survivability of the aircraft and reduce pilot workload under failure conditions
NASA Aircraft Controls Research, 1983
The workshop consisted of 24 technical presentations on various aspects of aircraft controls, ranging from the theoretical development of control laws to the evaluation of new controls technology in flight test vehicles. A special report on the status of foreign aircraft technology and a panel session with seven representatives from organizations which use aircraft controls technology were also included. The controls research needs and opportunities for the future as well as the role envisioned for NASA in that research were addressed. Input from the panel and response to the workshop presentations will be used by NASA in developing future programs
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