Some descending intemeurones (DNs) in insects encode deviation from flight course. Intracellular recording reveals their inputs (from eyes, wind hairs, proprioceptive information from the neck and in some cases ocelli). Intracellular stimulation during flight reveals their motor effects. All components of steering (modification of wing stroke, ruddering with the hind legs, ruddering with the ab...

Stability augmentation systems make the aircraft more stable. There are SASs for both the dynamic stability (whether the eigenmotions don’t diverge) and the static stability (whether the equilibrium position itself is stable). First, we’ll look at the dynamic stability: how can we effect the eigenmotion properties? Second, we’ll examine the static stability: how do we make sure an aircraft stay...

Purpose: This paper examines an oft-neglected aspect of qualitative research practice – conducting a pilot – using the innovative approach of ‘e-research’ to generate both practical and methodological

This paper presents an interactive method for building a controller for dynamic systems by using a combination of knowledge acquisition and machine learning techniques. The aim is to build the controller by acquiring the knowledge of an operator skilled at that task. This method has been demonstrated for the skill of learning to f i l l an aircraft in a flight simulator. The simulator has been ...

With increasing marine transportation and logistics, the ship autopilot has become much more important not only to lower the seaman's operating intensions, but also to reduce the seaman's deployment. It is still a challenge to design ship coursekeeping controller because of ship's uncertain dynamics and time-varying environmental disturbance. This study focuses on backstepping adaptive course-k...

On 1 August 2005, a Boeing Company 777-200 aircraft, operating on an international passenger flight from Australia to Malaysia, was involved in a significant upset event while flying on autopilot. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s investigation into the event discovered that “an anomaly existed in the component software hierarchy that allowed inputs from a known faulty accelerometer to b...

We present a real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environment for the validation of a new hierarchical path planning and control algorithm for a small fixed-wing UAV. The complete control algorithm is validated through on-board, realtime implementation on a small autopilot having limited computational resources. We present two distinct real-time software frameworks for implementing t...

In a previous paper (see ‘Tolerant, Classical, Strict’, henceforth TCS) we investigated a semantic framework to deal with the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, namely that small changes do not affect the applicability of a vague predicate even if large changes do. Our approach there rests on two main ideas. First, given a classical extension of a predicate, we can define a strict and a t...