This paper describes the development and application of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of novel autonomous flight algorithms for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The system provides a small team with the ability to rapidly prototype new theoretical concepts and flight-test their performance in realistic mission scenarios. The original development was done using MATRIXX Xmath/SystemBuild environment almost a decade ago. Currently, the system has been converted to the Mathworks MATLAB/Simulink development environment. This paper describes the hardware and software tools developed for the system and briefly discusses the variety of projects including vision-based target tracking, 3D path following, SUAV control over the network and high-resolution imagery on the fly.
This paper presents flight-test results that examine the performance and robustness properties of an L 1 control augmentation loop implemented onboard a small unmanned aerial vehicle. The framework used for in-flight control evaluation is based on the Rohrs counterexample, a benchmark problem presented in the early 1980s, to show the limitations of adaptive controllers developed at that time. Hardware-in-the-loop simulations and flight-test results confirm the ability of the L 1 flight control system to maintain stability and predictable performance of the closed-loop adaptive system in the presence of general (artificially injected) unmodeled dynamics. The results demonstrate the advantages of L 1 control as a robust adaptive control architecture with the potential of facilitating the transition of adaptive control into advanced flight control systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.