Flying birds rely on visual cues for retinal image stabilization by negating rotation-induced optic flow, the motion of the visual panorama across the retina, through corrective eye and head movements. In combination with vestibular and proprioceptive feedback, birds may also use visual cues to stabilize their body during flight. Here, we test whether artificially induced wide-field motion gene...

During the summer of 1996 a series of ̄ight tests demonstrated a new indirect-adaptive approach to recon®gurable ̄ight control known as the self-designing controller (SDC). The SDC achieves improved, appropriately decoupled responses during arbitrary effector or airframe impairment scenarios, and successful SDC ̄ight tests culminated with smooth landing of the VISTA/F-16 in crosswind conditions...

Modern exploration missions require modern control systems that can handle catastrophic changes in behavior, compensate for slow deterioration in sustained operations, and support fast system identification. The dynamics and control of new vehicles remains a significant technical challenge. Neural network based adaptive controllers have these capabilities, but they can only be used safely if pr...

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyze flight test results of a Long Term Learning Adaptive Flight Controller implemented on a rotorcraft and a fixed wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. The adaptive control architecture used is based on a proven Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) architecture employing a Neural Network as the adaptive element. The method employed for training the Ne...

The Flight Simulation and Software Branch (FSSB) at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) maintains the unique national asset identified as the Transport Research Facility (TRF). The TRF is a group of facilities and integration laboratories utilized to support the LaRC’s simulation-to-flight concept. This concept incorporates common software, hardware, and processes for both groundbased flight si...

The use of flight simulation tools to reduce the schedule, risk, and required amount of flight-testing for complex aerospace systems is a well-recognized benefit of these approaches. However, some special challenges arise when one attempts to obtain these benefits for the development and operation of a research Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. Research UAV systems are characterized by t...

A time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS) developed in our laboratory at Isfahan University of Technology is described here. The TOF-MS instrument uses laser as the ionization source which provides an opportunity to investigate the ions formed in laser ablation or desorption. The TOF-MS has an ionization chamber containing an accelerator and an ion lens to focus the ions into a one meter line...

Simulator fidelity has been defined as the conformance of a flight simulator to the characteristics of the real aircraft. Objective fidelity evaluation is an engineering approach that attacks the fidelity problem with comparison of simulator and the actual system behavior over some quantitative measures. Testing can be pronounced as the fundamental mean for this comparison. From the utilization...