This paper presents a sequential loop closure approach to designing a velocity and altitude tracking autopilot for a hypersonic vehicle. The control architecture consists of two decoupled control subsystems, one for velocity, the other for altitude. The velocity control subsystem consists of an adaptive augmented baseline controller. The altitude control subsystem consists of an adaptive inner-...

Abstract. This paper presents a robust control law design for a commercial aircraft pitch autopilot dedicated to perform the approach maneuver. The design involves only the longitudinal axis. Traditionally, in the aerospace industry, the design of autopilot functions follows a process that involves the partitioning of the flight operational envelope into separate flight conditions, the design o...

In this study, pilots were asked to achieve a specific time in trail while flying an arrival into Louisville International airport. Weather shortly before the start of the descent added variability to the initial intervals. A spacing tool calculated airspeeds intended to achieve the desired time in trail at the final approach fix. Pilots were exposed to four experimental conditions which varied...

Abstract: Along with increasing marine transportation and logistics, the ship autopilot has become much 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 course-keeping controller because of ship's uncertain dynamics and time-varying environmental disturbance. This study focuses on backstepping adapt...

This paper depicts the applications of classical root locus based PID control to the longitudinal flight dynamics of a Flying Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, P15035, developed by Monash Aerobotics Research Group in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering, Monash University, VIC, Australia. The challenge associated with our UAV is related to the fact that all of its motions a...

This article presents an adaptive method for ArduPilot-based autopilots of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ArduPilot is a popular open-source vehicle software suite. We explore how to augment the PID loops embedded inside with model-free control method. The augmentation, adopted both attitude and total energy control, uses input/output data without requiring explicit model UAV. augm...

This paper presents the air-to-air missile autopilot design for a 180° heading reversal maneuver during boost-phase. The missile’s dynamics are linearized at a set of operating points for which angle of attack controllers are designed to cover an extended flight envelope. Then, angle of attack controllers are designed for this set of points, utilizing a pole-placement approach. The controllers’...

In this study, pilots were asked to achieve a specific time in trail while flying an arrival into Louisville International airport. Weather shortly before the start of the descent added variability to the initial intervals. A spacing tool calculated airspeeds intended to achieve the desired time in trail at the final approach fix. Pilots were exposed to four experimental conditions which varied...

A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm is used to determine the membership function distribution within the outer loop control system of a non-linear missile autopilot using lateral acceleration control. This produces a design that meets objectives related to closed loop performance such as: steady state error, overshoot, settling and rising time. The evolutionary algorithm uses non-dominated...