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Aerospace Engineering

Theses and Dissertations

2018

Optimization

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Simplex Control Methods For Robust Convergence Of Small Unmanned Aircraft Flight Trajectories In The Constrained Urban Environment, Michael D. Zollars Sep 2018

Simplex Control Methods For Robust Convergence Of Small Unmanned Aircraft Flight Trajectories In The Constrained Urban Environment, Michael D. Zollars

Theses and Dissertations

Constrained optimal control problems for Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (SUAS) have long suffered from excessive computation times caused by a combination of constraint modeling techniques, the quality of the initial path solution provided to the optimal control solver, and improperly defining the bounds on system state variables, ultimately preventing implementation into real-time, on-board systems. In this research, a new hybrid approach is examined for real-time path planning of SUAS. During autonomous flight, a SUAS is tasked to traverse from one target region to a second target region while avoiding hard constraints consisting of building structures of an urban environment. Feasible …


Scheduling Tool For The Nevada Test And Training Range, Miguel J. Macias Mar 2018

Scheduling Tool For The Nevada Test And Training Range, Miguel J. Macias

Theses and Dissertations

Presently, the 57th Wing Scheduler at Nellis AFB schedules daily mission requests to the Nevada Test and Training Range (NTTR) airspace manually. The process is time consuming and may lead to suboptimal range resource allocations. The goal of this study is to provide the scheduler with an automated scheduling approach that will improve range scheduling efficiency. The tool developed uses range request data from units at Nellis AFB to produce daily mission schedules for a month long scheduling horizon with Microsoft VBA code and a commercial Integer Program (IP) solver. Under our current understanding of scheduler priorities, we formulate the …