A general-purpose computational steering system (POSSE) which can be coupled to any C/C++ simulation code, has been developed and tested with a 3-D Navier-Stokes flow solver (PUMA2). This paper illustrates how to use “computational steering” with PUMA2 to visualize CFD solutions while they are being computed, and even change the input data while it is running. In addition, the visualizations ca...

The MIT Faculty has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. ABSTRACT This paper investigates the dynamics of the SMART rotor, and presents a method to design a gain-scheduled controller to reduce the harmonic vibration throughout the flight envelope. The dynamics of the SMART rotor was examined at various flight conditions through nonli...

C We have created a diagnostic system for the US Navy to use in the analysis of the “running health” of helicopter rotor systems. Although our system is not yet deployed for real-time in-flight diagnosis, we have successfully analyzed the data sets of actual helicopter rotor failures supplied by the US Navy. We discuss both critical techniques supporting the design of our stochastic diagnostic ...

When used in an air medical setting, medical equipment designed for use in hospitals can fail from the stresses of in-flight use, or they interfere with critical rotor-wing aircraft systems. From January 1989 to June 1992, 34 medical devices, including monitor/defibrillators, infusion pumps, vital-signs monitors, ventilators and infant transport incubators, were tested under extreme conditions ...

One challenge of autonomous flight is creating a system for planning routes and reacting to environments that is fast enough to take full advantage of the high speed of aircraft. This problem of obstacle avoidance is especially relevant when creating a program that lands robotic helicopters in urban environments. Since these areas are highly concentrated with static obstacles like buildings as ...

This paper presents an application of a recently developed command governor-based adaptive control framework to a high-fidelity autonomous helicopter model. This framework is based on an adaptive controller, but the proposed command governor adjusts the trajectories of a given command in order to follow an ideal reference system (capturing a desired closed-loop system behavior) both in transien...