APPROACH

INCEPTION combines adaptive control schemes with incremental approaches to enable a novel class of control systems, which are independent of the considered aerial platform and can be transferred with minor modifications to various flying vehicles. By incorporating the general physical knowledge about flight system dynamics (type of the aircraft, available controls, flight envelope) together with INCEPTION’s modular control laws, the basis for platform-independent autopilot design will be therefore provided.

Autopilot proposed in INCEPTION keeps the aircraft aloft as long as the physical limits of the actual aircraft configuration are respected. In order to guarantee that the aircraft remains always within the physical possible flight envelope, an online envelope prediction algorithm predicts the safe regime of operation by making use of the new sensor techniques and additional measurements. This online prediction ensures that the demanded aircraft trajectory always coincides with the safe envelope area.

In first steps the Consortium is going to define scenarios to be investigated in INCEPTION. That requires identification of failures to be simulated among other relevant flight conditions. Some examples of failures considered: actuator hard over, actuator stuck-in-position, actuator floating, actuator oscillating, actuator rate and deflection degradation (in all 3-axes), eventually total loss of control surface and others.

TESTBED

This project makes use of the Boeing 747 model from the Reconfigurable Control for Vehicle Emergency Run (RECOVER) project (access here: http://faulttolerantcontrol.nl).