Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-92)

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-58).

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, June, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-92)

Michael Athans. / "September 1980" "Proceedings 19th IEEE Decision and Control Conference, Albuquerque, N.M., December 1980." / Bibliography: leaf 5. / "Office of Naval Research ... contract ONR/N00014-77-C-0532" "Air Force Office of Scientific Research ... contract AFOSR-80-0229"

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Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen continual growth in both research and commercial applications. Attractive features such as their small size, light weight and low cost are a strong driver of this growth. However, these factors also bring about some drawbacks. The light weight and small size means that small UAVs are far more susceptible to performance degradation from factors such as wind gusts. Due to the generally low cost, available sensors are somewhat limited in both quality and available measurements. For example, it is very unlikely that angle of attack is sensed by a small UAV. These aircraft are usually constructed by the end user, so a tangible amount of variation will exist between different aircraft of the same type. Depending on application, additional variation between flights from factors such as battery placement or additional sensors may exist. This makes the application of optimal model based control methods difficult. Research literature on the topic of small UAV control is very rich in regard to high level control, such as path planning in wind. A common assumption in such literature is the existence of a low level control method which is able to track demanded aircraft attitudes to complete a task. Design of such controllers in the presence of significant wind or modelling errors (factors collectively addressed as lumped disturbances herein) is rarely considered. Disturbance Observer Based Control (DOBC) is a means of improving the robustness of a baseline feedback control scheme in the presence of lumped disturbances. The method allows for the rejection of the influence of unmeasurable disturbances much more quickly than traditional integral control, while also enabling recovery of nominal feedback con- trol performance. The separation principle of DOBC allows for the design of a nominal feedback controller, which does not need to be robust against disturbances. A DOBC augmentation can then be applied to ensure this nominal performance is maintained even in the presence of disturbances. This method offers highly attractive properties for control design, and has seen a large rise in popularity in recent years. Current literature on this subject is very often conducted purely in simulation. Ad- ditionally, very advanced versions of DOBC control are now being researched. To make the method attractive to small UAV operators, it would be beneficial if a simple DOBC design could be used to realise the benefits of this method, as it would be more accessible and applicable by many. This thesis investigates the application of a linear state space disturbance observer to low level flight control of a small UAV, along with developments of the method needed to achieve good performance in flight testing. Had this work been conducted purely in simulation, it is likely many of the difficulties encountered would not have been addressed or discovered. This thesis presents four main contributions. An anti-windup method has been devel- oped which is able to alleviate the effect of control saturation on the disturbance observer dynamics. An observer is designed which explicitly considers actuator dynamics. This development was shown to enable faster observer estimation dynamics, yielding better disturbance rejection performance. During initial flight testing, a significant aeroelastic oscillation mode was discovered. This issue was studied in detail theoretically, with a pro- posed solution developed and applied. The solution was able to fully alleviate the effect in flight. Finally, design and development of an over-actuated DOBC method is presented. A method for design of DOBC for over actuated systems was developed and studied. The majority of results in this thesis are demonstrated with flight test data.

A study has been conducted of reaction controls for VSTOL aircraft using thrust augmenting ejector techniques. Rapid mixing nozzles have been developed for high pressure ejectors. Mass flow increases for sonic nozzles of up to 50\ at x/D=8 were recorded, compared with plain circular nozzles. Their use was found to improve the thrust performance of a simple ejector by 9\, and larger increases are believed possible. Results from an ejector performance prediction model were successfully compared with experimental data. The use of rapid mixing nozzles in a practical ejector design has been assessed. It is predicted that a maximum thrust increment of 20\ ·could be achieved, compared with a simple fully expanded jet flow.

Integrated Modular Avionics standardises hardware and software platforms of Line Replaceable Modules (LRMs) and other system components in order to reduce the overall cost of system development. operation and maintenance. Several identical processing units within a cabinet. and fast communication media in the form of a backplane bus introduces further possibility of reconfiguring the system in terms of changing the applications performed by particular core LRMs. In this thesis a study into Reconfigurable Integrated Modular Avionics is presented. The main objectives of the project were to investigate the benefits, and feasibility of, employing autonomous dynamic in-tlight reconfiguration of the system as a means for providing fault-tolerance. In this approach, allowing processing modules to change their function permits the system to share the redundant modules as well as sacrificing less important avionics functions to sustain the more critical applications. Various architecture examples are reviewed in order to establish a system design that would support reconfiguration at a minimal cost. Two modified ARINC 651 architecture examples are proposed for implementation of dynamic in-flight reconfiguration. The benefits of reconfiguration are identified with the use of Markov state space analysis, and are found to be substantial with respect to the reduced number of redundant processing modules required to implement the system functions within the safety requirements. Suitable reconfiguration schemes are identified, and the most promising one is formally specified with the use of the Vienna Development Method. The safety properties of the scheme are shown based on the specification. In order to study the feasibility of autonomous dynamic reconfiguration, the scheme is implemented into two distinct systems, and the results of the practical observation of the system behaviour are presented and discussed. As the project was sponsored by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, a number of certification issues related to reconfigurable avionics systems are identified and discussed based on the practical implementation and previous theoretical analysis. It is concluded that dynamic in-flight reconfiguration of avionics systems can lead to substantial savings in terms of the reduced number of required core LRMs, and greater fault-tolerance than traditional non-reconfigurable systems

Any redundancy scheme in aircraft control systems is usually considered separately from the control algorithms involved. All feedback control systems are usually designed under the assumption that their sensors will not fail. When the integrity requirements demand it, then a redundancy scheme must be designed to provide any required measurements with only extremely short interruptions to normal service being caused by failures of individual sensors.

The methodology for the design of error-actuated digital set-point tracking controllers proposed by Porter and co-workers has emerged as a result of the pursuit of effective and practical solutions to the problem of designing digital control systems for unknown, dynamically complex multivariable plants with measurable outputs. In this thesis, such digital set-point tracking controllers and the resulting digital set-point tracking systems are enriched to embrace plants with unmeasurable outputs and plants with more outputs than manipulated inputs. In the study of the latter plants, the novel concepts of limit tracking (i.e. the tracking exhibited by plants with more outputs than inputs) is introduced and an associated methodology for the design of self-selecting controllers is proposed. Such controllers involve the selection of different set-point tracking controllers to control the most critical subset of plant outputs based upon the developed rigorous theoretical foundations for the limit-tracking systems. In such foundations, the classification of linear multivariable plants into Class I and Class II plants based upon their steady-state transfer function matrices facilitates the assessment of the feasibility of limit-tracking systems. Furthermore, the associated order-reduction technique simplifies the problem of deciding the minimum numbers of different subsets of plant outputs to be controlled by corresponding set-point tracking controllers. In addition, the dynamical properties of limit-tracking systems are also investigated using the phase-plane method and a methodology for the design of supervisory self-selecting controllers is proposed so as to prevent the occurrence of dynamical peculiarities such as limit-cycle oscillations which might happen in limit-tracking systems. The effectiveness of all the proposed methodologies and techniques is illustrated by examples, and the robustness properties of set-point tracking systems and limit-tracking systems in the face of plant variations and unknown disturbances are tested. Finally, self-selecting controllers are designed for a nonlinear gas-turbine engine and their practical effectiveness is clearly demonstrated.