Sharif Digital Repository

Designing an intelligent controller for landing phase of a jet transport aircraft in presence of different wind patterns, in order to expand the flight safety envelope has been considered. There are some dangerous conditions like gusts and downbursts which may occur rarely in service life of aircraft, though, aircraft must be tested for these dangerous conditions. Then it is desired to design a controller that not only acts well in usual conditions but also has an acceptable performance in those hazardous conditions. Four different types of controllers have been designed named PID, Neuro, hybrid Neuro-PID and Anfis-PID (Adaptive Network-based Fuzzy Inference System) controllers. Simulation... 

This work presents a novel approach to redefine a "Safe Aircraft" based on systems engineering fundamentals. We aim todemonstrate the possibility as well as suitability of the "Functional-Aircraft" instead of currently employed concept of "Physically-defined-Safe-Aircraft". The current work is consistent with ever-increasing number of flights; as it suggests that any aircraft that can complete its mission should not declare emergencies due to any physical malfunction. With proper simulations, wedemonstrate the feasibility of "Functionally Safe" concept as oppose to the "Physically Safe" aircraft. The process revolves around standard and well-known documents such as FTA and FMEA; which are... 

In this paper, a class of uncertain piecewise affine (PWA) systems, subject to system and measurement external disturbances are studied. The uncertainties are assumed to be norm bounded and the external disturbance signals belong to the L2 space. The problem of optimizing the system response in the H?sense, by means of a piecewise affine observer-controller, is formulated as an optimization problem subject to a number of constraints in the form of matrix inequalities. The derived constraints are obtained by considering a partially piecewise quadratic Lyapunov function in combination with the general conditions for H?stability. Then the uncertain PWA approximation of the nonlinear attitude... 

Dynamic vibration absorbers are used to reduce the undesirable vibrations in many applications such as electrical transmission lines, helicopters, gas turbines, engines, bridges and etc. One type of these absorbers is tunable vibration absorber (TVA) which can act as a semi-active controller. In this paper, by applying a (TVA), chatter vibration is suppressed during boring process in which boring bar is modeled as a cantilever Euler-Bernoulli beam. The optimum specifications of absorber such as spring stiffness, absorber mass and its position can be determined by developing an algorithm based upon mode summation method. Finally, using the SIMULINK Toolbox of MATLAB, the analog simulated... 

Ways to reduce an airline's cost has been studied for years. In fact, in order to achieve this goal, ones need to know different types of airline's costs including; fuel and oil, maintenance, Ticketing, passenger services, etc. and their impact on the total cost of an airline. According to announcement of ICAO [1], "maintenance cost (about 11% of total cost) is the second major cost after fuel and oil". Therefore, this may attract airline owners' attention to find ways to control maintenance cost and eventually the total cost of an airline. Though, there are many systematic approaches to analyze cost reduction and making policies, in this article, SD modeling is applied to develop a... 

In this paper, a nonlinear adaptive impedance controller is proposed for UAVs equipped with a robot manipulator that interacts with environment. In this adaptive controller, by considering the nonlinear dynamics model of the UAV plus the robot manipulator in Cartesian coordinates, all of model parameters are considered to be completely uncertain and their estimation is updated using an adaptation law. The objective of the proposed adaptive controller is the control of manipulator's end-effector impedance in Cartesian coordinates to have a stable physical interaction. The adjustable Cartesian impedance is a desired dynamical relationship between the end-effector motion in Cartesian... 

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach in terrain following (TF) flight using fuzzy logic. The fuzzy controller as presented in this work decides where and how the aircraft needs to change its altitude. The fast decision-making nature of this method promises real-time applications even for tough terrains in terms of shape and peculiarities. The method could always assist to design trajectories in an off-line manner. Design/methodology/approach - To achieve the aforementioned goal, the method effectively incorporates the dynamics of the aircraft. Basically, the mathematical method employs special relationships among existing slope of the terrain and its derivative... 

Tight unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomous missions such as formation flight (FF) and aerial refueling (AR) require an active controller that works in conjunction with a precise sensor that is able to identify an in-front aircraft and to estimate its relative position and orientation. Among possible choices vision sensors are of interest because they are passive in nature and do not require the cooperation of the in-front aircraft in any way. In this paper new vision-based estimation and navigation algorithms based on neural networks is developed. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm have been validated via a detailed modeling and a complete virtual environment based on... 

In this paper, a new nonlinear robust adaptive impedance controller is addressed for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with a robot manipulator that physically interacts with environment. A UAV equipped with a robot manipulator is a novel system that can perform different tasks instead of human being in dangerous and/or inaccessible environments. The objective of the proposed robust adaptive controller is control of the UAV and its robotic manipulators end-effector impedance in Cartesian space in order to have a stable physical interaction with environment. The proposed controller is robust against parametric uncertainties in the nonlinear dynamics model of the UAV and the robot... 

Integrated guidance and control of an elastic flight vehicle based on constrained robust model predictive control is proposed. The design is based on a partial state feedback control law that minimizes a cost function within the framework of linear matrix inequalities. It is shown that the solution of the defined optimization problem stabilizes the nonlinear plant. Nonlinear kinematics and dynamics are taken into account, and internal stability of the closed-loop nonlinear system is guaranteed. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed integrated guidance and control against non-maneuvering and weaving targets are evaluated using computer simulations  

Design of a vision-based target tracking control strategy for a dual-rotor UAV with tilting rotors is presented. In this research, the under-study UAV is equipped with a sliding mass that can slide over a motorized linear track attached to the UAV's fuselage enabling it to perform sophisticated maneuvers by monitoring its five controllable degrees of freedom. The dynamic model of the system is first derived and then a model-based controller using vision based pose estimation, obtained via an onboard down-looking camera, is designed enabling the UAV to: (1) pitch hover in position, (2) servo towards a target position, and (3) track a moving target. Simulations show the premise of the proposed... 

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to design an adaptive nonlinear controller for a nonlinear system of integrated guidance and control. Design/methodology/approach: A nonlinear integrated guidance and control approach is applied to a homing, tail-controlled air vehicle. Adaptive backstepping controller technique is used to deal with the problem, and the Lyapanov theory is used in the stability analysis of the nonlinear system. A nonlinear model of normal force coefficient is obtained from an existing nonlinear model of lift coefficient which was validated by open loop response. The simulation was performed in the pitch plane to prove the benefits of the proposed scheme; however, it can... 

A novel adaptive model-based predictive controller for attitude and trajectory tracking of a vertical take-off and landing(VTOL) aircraft in the simultaneous presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances is introduced in this study. Animportant challenge of designing the model-based controllers is developing an accurate model, especially in the presence ofmodel uncertainties. In this study, first, the nominal model of a ducted-fan air vehicle, which is a multi-input multi-outputnonlinear system with non-minimum phase behaviour, is given as the test case of this research. After that, two modified robustand adaptive model predictive controllers are proposed for tracking a... 

Quadrotors have become very popular, both commercially and as research platforms. Numerous studies have been carried out on these aerial vehicles, covering different aspects of their dynamics and control. Many of the interesting applications of quadrotors arise when they are used as part of a cooperative robotic system, consisting of aerial and ground robots. Two essential steps toward realizing autonomous teams of aerial and ground robots are achieving position coordination between them, and autonomous landing of aerial robots on ground platforms. The goal of this paper is to tackle the problems of tracking and landing of an aerial robot on a mobile platform. Two approaches are presented... 

A novel fault-tolerant model predictive control (MPC)-based trajectory tracking approach for an aerial vehicle is presented in this study. A generalised online sequential extreme learning machine is introduced first to identify the corresponding coefficients of actuator faults. Subsequently, a robust trajectory tracking control is developed based on MPC, where the system constraints can be effectively considered in the designed control scheme. Trajectory tracking control is achieved by controlling only the acceleration of the aerial robot in the MPC structure. This leads to less computational burden and faster closed-loop dynamics. In addition, an effective disturbance observer is employed,... 

In recent years, unmanned aerial systems have attracted great attention due to the electronic systems technology advancements. Among these vehicles, unmanned helicopters are more important because of their special abilities and superior performance. The complex nonlinear dynamic system (caused by main rotor flapping dynamics coupled with the rigid body rotational motion) and considerable effects of ambient disturbance make their utilization hard in actual missions. Attitude dynamics have the main role in helicopter stabilization, so implementing proper control system for attitude is an important issue for unmanned helicopter hovering and trajectory tracking performance. Besides this,... 

Tight unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomous missions such as formation flight and aerial refueling (AR) requires an active controller that works in conjunction with a precise vision-based sensor that is able to extract In-front aircraft relative position and orientation from captured images. A key point in implementing such a sensor is its robustness in the presence of noises and other uncertainties. In this paper, a new vision-based algorithm that uses neural networks to estimate the In-front aircraft relative orientation and position is developed. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed algorithm has been validated via a detailed modeling and a complete virtual environment based on... 

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe optical flow-based navigation of a very light fixed-wing aircraft in flight between obstacles. Design/methodology/approach - The optical flow information of two cameras mounted on the aircraft is used to detect the obstacle. It is assumed that the image processing has been completed and the optical flow vectors have been obtained beforehand. The optical flow is used to detect the obstacles and make a rapid turn manoeuvre for the aircraft. Findings - It is shown that using the optical flow feedback by itself is unable to give a rapid turn to the aircraft and its rate should be employed into the control law. Six degree-of-freedom flight... 

This research deals with developing an intelligent trajectory tracking control approach for an aircraft in the presence of internal and external disturbances. Internal disturbances including actuators faults, unmodeled dynamics, and model uncertainties as well as the external disturbances such as wind turbulence significantly affect the performance of the common trajectory tracking control approaches. There are several fault-tolerant control approaches in the literature to overcome the effects of specific actuator or sensor faults during the flight. However, trajectory tracking control of an air vehicle in the presence of unexpected faults and simultaneous presence of wind turbulence is...