Michigan/AFRL Collaborative Center in Control Science

Cooperative Control of Unmanned Air Vehicles (C2UAV)

• Faculty members: Anouck Girard, Emilio Frazzoli
• Post-doctoral fellow:
• Graduate students: John J. Baker, Amir Matlock, Ricardo Sanfelice, Sertac Karaman, Christopher Oravetz

This concentration addresses the problem of coordinating the motion of a possibly large number of heterogeneous mobile agents, in order to provide persistent, real-time, human-driven tactical services, to operators in the field. Mobile agents will in general include autonomous or semi-autonomous fixed- and rotary wing aircraft, ground vehicles, and human-controlled units, operating over a geographically extended region of interest. Services of interest may include, for example, Urban Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), cooperative attack, cooperative sensing, and communication relays. The objective of the cooperative control effort will be to ensure the highest possible aggregate Quality of Service. The proposed work will focus on two main issues:

• Supervision and control of cooperative heterogeneous systems, in the perspective of mixed-initiative operations, including information de-confliction and combination, multi-scale representations, and interconnected decision and control systems to maximize situation awareness
• Dynamic, sequential, combinatorial and/or stochastic mission planning, including the development of a systematic approach to the design and analysis of provably efficient, scalable, robust, and adaptive algorithms for cooperative control of large-scale heterogeneous networks of mobile agents. The work will be performed in close collaboration with researchers at AFRL/VACA

Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles (ABHV)

• Faculty members: Carlos Cesnik, James Driscoll
• Post-doctoral fellow:
• Graduate students: Torsten Skujins, Sean Torrez, Nathan Scholten, Nate Falkiewicz

Designing effective controllers for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles require reliable characterization of these vehicles' unique dynamics. These come from the strong interactions between the aerodynamics, elastic airframe and control effector deformations, heat transfer, and propulsion system (itself tightly integrated into the lifting body), making the characterization of the flight dynamics of such vehicles very challenging. The proposed work will focus on two main issues:

• Development of simple low-order models that can characterize the main aeroservothermoelastic effects coupled with propulsion and can be used in a 6 DOF flight dynamics simulation of ABHV
• Determination on how to appropriately modify vehicle configuration to improve its dynamic controllability without compromising vehicle performance. These will be performed in close collaboration with researchers at AFRL/VACA who will provide primarily the control design and modeling expertise as part of the Collaborative Center

Flapping-Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAV)

• Faculty members: Anouck Girard
• Post-doctoral fellow:
• Graduate students: Christopher Thomas Orlowski

There is a growing interest in flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles because of their ability to perform in both the flight regimes of helicopters (hovering, backwards flight, perching) and of aircraft (fixed wing gliding). The proposed increase in maneuverability and power efficiency are being evaluated through the following methods:

• Development of mathematical ornithopter modeling to characterize the dynamics, kinematics, and power of a flapping wing. These models will be initially tuned using prototype ornithopters and will drive future basic prototyping requirements. As future prototypes are developed, the ornithopter models will be tuned for higher fidelity.
• Modular prototype construction to allow for rapid iteration and enhancement of wing design, actuator configuration, and accuracy of the simplified ornithopter models.
• Explororation of onboard actuators for control onboard to consider 1) sufficient control in both flight regimes (hovering and forward flight) and 2) switching between flight regimes (hovering to and from forward flight).
• Designing of an onboard micro-electronics suite to independently control each wing. This suite will contain a radio for telemetry and microcontroller for receiver decoding and commanding actuators.
• Future prototypes will have their flight stabilized using the Autonomous Control Environment with the ability for off-board communication and transmission of control commands remotely to the vehicle.

Copyright © 2007
Aerospace & Robotic Controls Laboratory
The University of Michigan - Ann Arbor