Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Swarms of unmanned aircraft are the inevitable future of the aerospace industry. In recent years, swarming robots and aircraft have been a subject of much interest; however, many research projects make impractical assumptions such as point mass dynamics with no aerodynamic effects for aircraft models, and most works stop short of fully validating their methods via flight testing. This work presents a proximity based guidance, navigation, and control of multi-agent fixed-wing unmanned aerial systems in an unstructured environment. A scalable swarm navigation method is developed using adaptive moving mesh partial differential equations controlled by the free energy heat flow equation. …

The impact of high update rate on the disparity in eigenvalues of the auto-correlation matrix, along with slow convergence and reduced stability of numerical analysis are well studied. However, the impact of high update rates of autopilots on the performance of unmanned aircraft has been ignored due to the intrinsic limitations of COTS autopilots

computation power. Although MEMS based IMUs have very high update rates, the majority of existing UAS autopilot system processing power is limited to 20 Hz. In this work, the challenges and processes for developing and flight test validating an autonomous flight controller for a large 30-kg …

Increased usage of quadcopters as an embedded system has raised the necessity of developing high quality dynamic models for designing controllers and simulations. In this work, a dynamic model was developed for a quadcopter platform by conducting experiments for estimating the moments of inertia and for determining motor dynamics. The dynamic model consisted of equations of motions derived from Newton and Euler's approach. Moments of inertia were estimated by operating a bifilar pendulum test. The motor dynamics were developed using a custom built test bed. The thrust, torque, voltage, and current were recorded in order to develop an adaptive dynamic …

This paper presents a novel guidance logic for multi-agent fixed-wing unmanned aerial systems using a moving mesh method. The moving mesh method is originally designed for use in the adaptive numerical solution of partial differential equations, where a high proportion of mesh points are placed in the regions of large solution variations and few points in the rest of the domain. In this work, the positions of the aircraft are considered as mesh nodes connected to form a triangular mesh in two spatial dimensions. The outer aircraft positions are planned with the reference point algorithm. This logic provides the outer …