This thesis studies algorithms to estimate an aircraft’s position with different information from various radio stations. Because aircrafts both civilian and military are heavily dependant on GNSS signals, it can be interfered from hostile sources. The aircraft shall then be able to navigate without the GNSS signals. This thesis focuses on three radio navigation systems, DME,VOR and TACAN. With the measurements from these three radio stations and measurements from the inertial navigation system one can estimate a position with an estimation filter. In this thesis two types of filters will be used, the linear Kalman filter and the Extended Kalman filter. The linear Kalman filter will be used when converting the TACAN measurements to a pseudo position and the Extended Kalman filter will be used for the DME,VOR and TACAN measurements. The results shows that the converted TACAN measurements and TACAN measurements estimates very well in both north and east direction. When using only DME measurements the filter estimates the position fairly well in the direction towards the station and poorly in the orthogonal direction. For the VOR measurements the filter estimates the position quite poorly in the direction of the radio station and well in the orthogonal direction. In conclusion the converted TACAN measurement and TACAN measurement algorithm can be used for navigation purposes by its own measurements. However, the DME and VOR measurement algorithms need to be combined or using multiple stations at different locations to get better estimates in both directions. All of the filter could use some better tuning to get the optimal filter, but it is not necessary.

A permanent magnet synchronous motor is a type of motor that is used in several different application areas, not least in an autonomous robots where it is the motor that drives the wheels. Today, many actors choose simulation as a tool to save money and time when product tests are performed. This thesis covers both the process of modeling a permanent magnet synchronous motor and regulating it at low speeds, in a simulation environment. As previously mentioned, the motor is a permanent magnet synchronous motor and is a direct-driven outrunner, which means that the motor and the wheel are combined and that the rotor is spinning outside the stator. On current robots in production, there is a gear ratio between the motor and wheels to be able to regulate the motor at higher speeds and thus generate a torque. The gearing contributes to losses and is an extra cost, so the examination of a direct-drive motor is interesting. The direct-drive motor has a lower working speed and is therefore by some reasons more difficult to regulate when applying torque load to the motor. The motor is equipped with current sensors and a position sensor, which has a certain resolution. The position sensor is speed-dependent in the sense that at lower RPMs fewer measurements are obtained, which is a problem when regulating the motor. The thesis examines two different control strategies, one of which is a more classic PI control that is often used on the market in various systems and the other is model predictive control (MPC). The latter is an online optimization where, with the help of information about the system, an optimal input signal is calculated and applied. Two different non-linear Kalman filters are also examined, which are implemented with the two different control strategies, to estimate the speed with the help of the measurements from current and the position sensor. The conclusion is an ideal motor model that mimics the physical motor. MPC is able to regulate the motor between 0-50 RPM, both with and without applied torque and even better with speed estimation from a Kalman filter. The PI controller is not able to regulate the motor at 2 RPM but for speeds at 10 RPM and greater, however with over-/undershoot after an acceleration.

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When operating an aircraft, inaccurate measurements can have devastating consequences. For example, when measuring airspeed using a pitot tube, icing effects and other faults can result in erroneous measurements. Therefore, this master thesis aims to create an alternative method which utilizes known flight mechanical equations and sensor fusion to create an estimate of the airspeed during flight. For validation and generation of flight data, a simulation model developed by SAAB AB, called ARES, is used.  Two models are used to describe the aircraft behavior. One of which is called the dynamic model and utilizes forces acting upon the aircraft body in the equations of motion. The other model, called the kinematic model, instead describes the motion with accelerations of the aircraft body. The measurements used are the angle of attack (AoA), side-slip angle (SSA), GPS velocities, and angular rates from an inertial measurement unit (IMU). The dynamic model assumes that engine thrust and aerodynamic coefficients are already estimated to calculate resulting forces, meanwhile the kinematic model instead uses body fixed accelerations from the IMU. These models are combined with filters to create estimations of the airspeed. The filters used are the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF). These are combined with the two models to create in total four methods to estimate the airspeed.  The results show no major difference in the performance between the filters except for computational time, for which the EKF has the fastest. Further, the result show similar airspeed estimation performance between the models, but differences can be seen. The kinematic model manages to estimate the wind with higher details and to converge faster, compared to the dynamic model. Both models suffer from an observability problem. This problem entails that the aircraft needs to be maneuvered to excite the AoA and SSA in order for the estimation methods to evaluate the wind, which is crucial for accurate airspeed estimation. The robustness of the dynamic model regarding errors in engine thrust and aerodynamic coefficients are also researched, which shows that the model is quite robust against errors in these values.

The project explores the possibilities on how to improve the accuracy of GPS velocity data by using sensor fusion with an extended Kalman filter. The proposed solution in this project is a sensor fusion between the GPS and IMU of the system, where the extended Kalman filter was used to estimate the velocity from the sensor data. The hardware used for the data acquisition to the proposed solution was a Pixhawk 4 (PX4), which has an IMU consisting of accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers. The PX4:s corresponding GPS module was also used to collect accurate velocity data. The data was logged using Simulink and later processed with MATLAB. The sensor fusion using the extended Kalman filter gave good estimates upon constant acceleration but had problems with estimating over varying acceleration. This was initially planned to be solved using smoothing filters, which is an essential part of the fusion process, but was never implemented due to time constraints. The constructed filter acts as a foundation towards future improvement. Other methods such as unscented Kalman filter, particle filter and neural network could also be explored to improve the estimation of the velocity due to these filters being known to have better performance. However, most of these alternatives need more computing power and are generally harder to implement compared to the extended Kalman filter. This project would be beneficial to QTAGG, since increasing the velocity resolution and accuracy of the system can provide possibilities of better optimization. It is also a commonly implemented solution where there are many state of the art implementations available.

The fast-growing electric vehicles (EVs) market demands huge efforts from car manufacturers to develop and improve their current products’ systems. A fast charge of the battery pack is one of the challenges encountered due to the battery limitations regarding behaviour and additional degradation when exposed to such a rough situation. In addition, the outcome of a study performed on a battery does not apply to others, especially if their chemistries are different. Hence, extensive testing is required to understand the influence of design decisions on the particular energy storage device to be implemented. Due to batteries’ nonlinear behaviour that is highly dependent on external variables such as temperature, the dynamic load and aging, another defying task is the widely studied state of charge (SOC) estimation, commonly considered one of the most significant functions in a battery management system (BMS). This thesis presents an extensive battery fast charging aging test study equipped with promising current charging profiles from published literature to minimize aging. Four charging protocols are carefully designed to charge the cell from 10 to 80% SOC within fifteen minutes and have their performances discussed. A dual state estimation algorithm is modelled to estimate the SOC with the assistance of a capacity state of health (SOHcap) estimation. Finally, the dual state estimation model is validated with the fast charging aging test data. / Thesis / Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering (MSME)

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Mechanical systems operate under parametric and external excitation uncertainties. The polynomial chaos approach has been shown to be more efficient than Monte Carlo approaches for quantifying the effects of such uncertainties on the system response. This work uses the polynomial chaos framework to develop new methodologies for the simulation, parameter estimation, and control of mechanical systems with uncertainty. This study has led to new computational approaches for parameter estimation in nonlinear mechanical systems. The first approach is a polynomial-chaos based Bayesian approach in which maximum likelihood estimates are obtained by minimizing a cost function derived from the Bayesian theorem. The second approach is based on the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The error covariances needed for the EKF approach are computed from polynomial chaos expansions, and the EKF is used to update the polynomial chaos representation of the uncertain states and the uncertain parameters. The advantages and drawbacks of each method have been investigated. This study has demonstrated the effectiveness of the polynomial chaos approach for control systems analysis. For control system design the study has focused on the LQR problem when dealing with parametric uncertainties. The LQR problem was written as an optimality problem using Lagrange multipliers in an extended form associated with the polynomial chaos framework. The solution to the Hâ problem as well as the H2 problem can be seen as extensions of the LQR problem. This method might therefore have the potential of being a first step towards the development of computationally efficient numerical methods for Hâ design with parametric uncertainties. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support provided for this work under NASA Grant NNL05AA18A. / Ph. D.

This thesis presents a dedicated GPS-denied landing system designed for electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The system employs active fiducial light pattern localization (AFLPL), which provides highly accurate and reliable navigation during critical landing phases. AFLPL utilizes images of a constellation comprised of modulating infrared lights strategically positioned on the landing site, to determine the aircraft pose through the use of a perspective-n-point (PnP) solver. The AFLPL system underwent thorough development, enhancement, and implementation to address and demonstrate its potential in navigation and its inherent limitations. A proposed method addresses the limitations of AFLPL by using an extended Kalman filter (EKF) to fuse PnP camera pose estimates with sensor measurements from an inertial measurement unit (IMU), attitude heading reference system (AHRS), and optional global positioning system (GPS). The EKF estimation is reported to significantly enhance the accuracy, reliability, and update frequency of the aircraft state estimation. To refine and validate the AFLPL and EKF algorithms, a simulation was developed, consisting of an eVTOL executing a glideslope landing trajectory. Furthermore, a hardware system consisting of a multirotor and infrared light ground units was implemented to test these methods under real-world conditions. This research culminated in the successful demonstration of the AFLPL-based estimation system's efficacy through an autonomous, GPS-denied landing flight test, affirming its potential to improve the navigation and control of eVTOL aircraft lacking access to GPS information.