This paper presents a control architecture designed to accommodate a selection of modern control algorithms on a full-scale rotary-wing, unmanned aerial vehicle. The architecture integrates a visual landing system, two path planners, a flight envelope protection algorithm, and two low-level flight controllers that were developed independently by six agencies in academia and industry. A newly de...

Modern aircraft can be equipped with a flight envelope protection system: automation which modifies pilot control inputs to ensure that the remains within allowable limits. Overruling may lead mode confusion, even when visual or auditory feedback is provided alert pilots. We advocate using active devices make system tangible pilot. This paper presents main findings of an evaluation three haptic...

This paper presents new results of a flight test of the L1 adaptive control architecture designed to directly compensate for significant uncertain cross-coupling in nonlinear systems. The flight test was conducted on the subscale turbine powered Generic Transport Model that is an integral part of the Airborne Subscale Transport Aircraft Research system at the NASA Langley Research Center. The r...

Neural network flight controllers are able to accommodate a variety of aircraft control surface faults without detectable degradation of aircraft handling qualities. Under some faults, however, the effective flight envelope is reduced; this can lead to unexpected behavior if a pilot performs an action that exceeds the remaining control authority of the damaged aircraft. The goal of our work is ...

A nonlinear flight dynamics model that can be adopted by small-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) helicopters is presented. To minimize structural complexity, the proposed nonlinear model contains only four essential components, i.e., kinematics, rigid-body dynamics, main rotor flapping dynamics, and yaw rate feedback controller dynamics. A five-step parameter determination procedure is propos...