Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics Commons^™

Autonomous Formation Flying And Proximity Operations Using Differential Drag On The Mars Atmosphere, Andres Eduardo Villa

Master's Theses

Due to mass and volume constraints on planetary missions, the development of control techniques that do not require fuel are of big interest. For those planets that have a dense enough atmosphere, aerodynamic drag can play an important role. The use of atmospheric differential drag for formation keeping was first proposed by Carolina L. Leonard in 1986, and has been proven to work in Earth atmosphere by many missions. Moreover, atmospheric drag has been used in the Mars atmosphere as aerobraking technique to decelerate landing vehicles, and to circularize the orbit of the spacecraft. Still, no literature was available related …

Nonlinear Uav Flight Control Using Command Filtered Backstepping, Brian M. Borra

Master's Theses

The aim of this effort is to implement a nonlinear flight control architecture, specifically flight path control via command filtered backstepping, for use in AME UAS's Fury® 1500 unmanned flying wing aircraft. Backstepping is a recursive, control-effort minimizing, constructive design procedure that interlaces the choice of a Lyapunov function with the design of feedback control. It allows the use of certain plant states to act as intermediate, virtual controls, for others breaking complex high order systems into a sequence of simpler lower-order design tasks.

Work herein is a simplified implementation based on publications by Farrell, Sharma, and Polycarpou. Online approximation …