Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics Commons^™

System Identification Of An Autonomous Surface Vehicle, Christopher John Cook

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The modeling and system identification of a small pontoon based marine craft, without rudder control, in a controlled environment. Old Dominion University's autonomous surface vehicle was modeled using the Observer/Kalman System Identification method. The experimental position data was collected using a laser positioning system along with Arduino based sensors on board the boat to collect the motor speeds of the dual outboard motors. The data was then compiled using the System/ Observer/Controller Identification Toolbox to derive a dynamic model that is capable of providing path estimation and prediction information to the autonomous robotic system.

Applied Mass Properties Identification Method To The Cal Poly's Spacecraft Simulator, Long H. Dam

Master's Theses

The Cal Poly Spacecraft Simulator is currently being developed for future testing and verifying theoretical control applications. This paper details the effort to balance the platform and remove undesired external torque from the system using System Identification technique developed by Patrick Healy. Since the relationship between the input and output of the system is linear, the least square method is proposed to identify the mass properties and location of center of mass of the system. The tests use four sine wave generators that are out of phase with different amplitudes as the inputs to excite various structural modes of the …

Optimal Uav Path Planning For Tracking A Moving Ground Vehicle With A Gimbaled Camera, Riley A. Livermore

Theses and Dissertations

This research develops a path planning algorithm that autonomously controls a UAV to provide convoy overwatch. The optimization algorithm determines the best path to y through developing a cost function that minimizes the control effort of the UAV and the deviation from a desired slant range. A heuristic-based algorithm was developed and implemented on the autopilot to approximate the optimal solution. In flight test, the UAV successfully tracked a moving ground vehicle by continually placing the UAV's loiter point directly above the ground vehicle's current location. This method was called the \follow-me mode and provided the baseline for real-world UAV …

Image-Aided Navigation Using Cooperative Binocular Stereopsis, Justin T. Soeder

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes a novel method for cooperatively estimating the positions of two vehicles in a global reference frame based on synchronized image and inertial information. The proposed technique - cooperative binocular stereopsis - leverages the ability of one vehicle to reliably localize itself relative to the other vehicle using image data which enables motion estimation from tracking the three dimensional positions of common features. Unlike popular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques, the method proposed in this work does not require that the positions of features be carried forward in memory. Instead, the optimal vehicle motion over a single …

Gps Multipath Reduction With Correlator Beamforming, Jason M. Barhorst

Theses and Dissertations

This research effort investigates the feasibility of beamforming using a single Global Positioning System (GPS) front end. Traditional methods of beamforming use multiple front ends, typically one per antenna element. By enabling a receiver to sample a switched antenna array, the hardware cost of implementing a GPS antenna array can be significantly reduced. Similar techniques of reducing the number of receivers have been used by Locata Corporation in the design of their non-GPS positioning systems. However, Locata Corporation's local transmitters provide a signal strength much higher than GPS's signal strength. For this reason, the inclusion of low-noise amplifiers into the …

High-Efficiency Thrust Vector Control Allocation, Jeb S. Orr, Nathan Slegers

Faculty Publications - Biomedical, Mechanical, and Civil Engineering

A generalized approach to the allocation of redundant thrust vector slew commands for multi-actuated launch vehicles is presented, where deflection constraints are expressed as omniaxial or elliptical deflection limits in gimbal axes. More importantly than in the aircraft control allocation problem, linear allocators (pseudoinverses) are preferred for large booster applications to facilitate accurate prediction of the control-structure interaction resulting from thrust vectoring effects. However, strictly linear transformations for the allocation of redundant controls cannot, in general, access all of the attainable moments for which there is a set of control effector positions thatsatisfles the constraints. In this paper, the control …

A Mathematical Framework For Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Obstacle Avoidance, Sorathan Chaturapruek

HMC Senior Theses

The obstacle avoidance navigation problem for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a very challenging problem. It lies at the intersection of many fields such as probability, differential geometry, optimal control, and robotics. We build a mathematical framework to solve this problem for quadrotors using both a theoretical approach through a Hamiltonian system and a machine learning approach that learns from human sub-experts' multiple demonstrations in obstacle avoidance. Prior research on the machine learning approach uses an algorithm that does not incorporate geometry. We have developed tools to solve and test the obstacle avoidance problem through mathematics.

Comparative Analysis Of Gps Data, Kiel Von Lindenberg

Undergraduate Journal of Mathematical Modeling: One + Two

The goal of this project is to calculate the distance traveled during a bike ride around the University of South Florida using information gathered by a GPS (Global Positioning System) application on a smartphone. We calculate the route distance in two ways: from latitudes and longitudes using the haversine formula and 2) from velocities and times using the trapezoidal rule. These computed distances were compared to the distance given by the smartphone application.

Filtered-Dynamic-Inversion Control For Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Systems, Jon Mullen

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Instrumented umanned aerial vehicles represent a new way of measuring turbulence in the atmospheric boundary layer. However, autonomous measurements require control methods with disturbance-rejection and altitude command-following capabilities. Filtered dynamic inversion is a control method with desirable disturbance-rejection and command-following properties, and this controller requires limited model information. We implement filtered dynamic inversion as the pitch controller in an altitude-hold autopilot. We design and numerically simulate the continuous-time and discrete-time filtered-dynamic-inversion controllers with anti-windup on a nonlinear aircraft model. Finally, we present results from a flight experiment comparing the filtered-dynamic-inversion controller to a classical proportional-integral controller. The experimental results show …

Robust And Adaptive Nonlinear Control Of Limit Cycle Oscillations In Uavs Using Synthetic Jet Actuators, Natalie Ramos Pedroza

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Limit cycle oscillations (LCO), also known as utter, cause significant challenges in fight control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and could potentially lead to structural damage and catastrophic failures. LCO can be described as vibrational motions in the pitching and plunging displacements of an aircraft wing. Even in low Reynolds number (low-Re) fight regimes, LCO can exceed the limiting boundary for safe UAV fight. Further, as practical considerations motivate the design of smaller, lighter weight UAVs, there is a growing need for UAV systems that do not require heavy mechanical actuators (e.g., ailerons). To address this, the use of synthetic …

Relative Motion Guidance, Navigation And Control For Autonomous Orbital Rendezvous, Mohamed Okasha, Brett Newman

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

In this paper, the dynamics of the relative motion problem in a perturbed orbital environment are exploited based on Gauss’ variational equations. The relative coordinate frame (Hill frame) is studied to describe the relative motion. A linear high fidelity model is developed to describe the relative motion. This model takes into account primary gravitational and atmospheric drag perturbations. In addition, this model is used in the design of a control, guidance, and navigation system of a chaser vehicle to approach towards and to depart from a target vehicle in proximity operations. Relative navigation uses an extended Kalman flter based on …

Autonomous Capabilities For Small Unmanned Aerial Systems Conducting Radiological Response: Findings From A High-Fidelity Discovery Experiment, Brittany Duncan, Robin Murphy

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

This article presents a preliminary work domain theory and identifies autonomous vehicle, navigational, and mission capabilities and challenges for small unmanned aerial systems (SUASs) responding to a radiological disaster. Radiological events are representative of applications that involve flying at low altitudes and close proximities to structures. To more formally understand the guidance and control demands, the environment in which the SUAS has to function, and the expected missions, tasks, and strategies to respond to an incident, a discovery experiment was performed in 2013. The experiment placed a radiological source emitting at 10 times background radiation in the simulated collapse of …

Intelligent Sensing Based On Low Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uav) For Bridge Condition Assessment, Theodore Teates, Austin Boyd, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The eventual completion of this project envisions the use of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to inspect bridge infrastructure. This project may also be expanded to encompass general object detection and inspection in order to unburden this technology so that it may reach its fullest potential. The project requires research and development in three distinct areas of image processing, control structures, and integration of systems. Initial undergraduate research sets the base knowledge for the overall project, explores the areas of concentration that are desired to expand upon in the future project, and provides a base UAV model that new researchers …

Identifiability Of Additive Actuator And Sensor Faults By State Augmentation, Suresh M. Joshi, Oscar R. Gonzalez, Jason M. Upchurch

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A class of FDI (fault detection and identification) methods for bias-type actuator and sensor faults was explored from the point of view of fault identifiability. The methods use banks of Kalman-Bucy filters (KBFs) to detect faults, determine the fault pattern, and estimate the fault values. A complete characterization of conditions for identifiability of bias-type actuator faults, sensor faults, and simultaneous actuator and sensor faults was presented. It was shown that FDI of simultaneous actuator and sensor faults is not possible using these methods when all sensors have unknown biases. The fault identifiability conditions were demonstrated via numerical examples. The analytical …

Robust Image-Based Visual Servo Control Of An Uncertain Missile Airframe, Murat Tunca Aygun

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

A nonlinear vision-based guidance law is presented for a missile-target scenario in the presence of model uncertainty and unknown target evasive maneuvers. To ease the readability of this thesis, detailed explanations of any relevant mathematical tools are provided, including stability definitions, the procedure of Lyapunov-based stability analysis, sliding mode control fundamentals, basics on visual servo control, and other basic nonlinear control tools. To develop the vision-based guidance law, projective geometric relationships are utilized to combine the image kinematics with the missile dynamics in an integrated visual dynamic system. The guidance law is designed using an image-based visual servo control method …

Adaptive Control Techniques For Transition-To-Hover Flight Of Fixed-Wing Uavs, Brian Decimo Marchini

Master's Theses

Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the ability to hover combine the speed and endurance of traditional fixed-wing fight with the stable hovering and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities of helicopters and quadrotors. This combination of abilities can provide strategic advantages for UAV operators, especially when operating in urban environments where the airspace may be crowded with obstacles. Traditionally, fixed-wing UAVs with hovering capabilities had to be custom designed for specific payloads and missions, often requiring custom autopilots and unconventional airframe configurations. With recent government spending cuts, UAV operators like the military and law enforcement agencies have been urging …

Aircraft Tests Arrive At Numbers Pilots Need For Safe Operations, Nihad E. Daidzic

Aviation Department Publications

No abstract provided.

The Stability And Control Of The Single Track Vehicles, Shyngys Karimov, Martin Corless

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Bicycles, motorcycles and scooters are all examples of the single track vehicles. The dynamics of the single track vehicle involve many degrees of freedom and various modes which govern its performance, making a complicated and interesting research topic. Motorcycle in motion can roll, yaw, and steer about the steering axis. It has three main modes which determine the motion and stability of it, they are weave, capsize, and wobble. The motorcycle performance is limited by the behavior of its modes, and if even one of the modes becomes unstable, the vehicle will roll over, and crash. The goal of this …

Remote Sensing Using Signals Of Opportunity, Alibek Yertay, James L. Garrison

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Today, there are more than eight thousand satellites in space. Therefore, Radio Frequency (RF) signals broadcast from satellites can be accessed from almost every point on the earth. There will be number of satellites available at most points on earth with different frequency bands. These satellite signals can be used for remote sensing, therefore software that visualizes footprints of satellites and shows characteristics of every satellite available at any point would be useful in determining which signals are available for reflectometry, method where direct satellite signals and reflected satellite signals are received and compared for analysis of certain area. There …

Attitude Estimation For A Gravity Gradient Momentum Biased Nanosatellite, Arash Mehrparvar

Master's Theses

Attitude determination and estimation algorithms are developed and implemented in simulation for the Exocube satellite currently under development by PolySat at Cal Poly. A mission requirement of ±5˚ of attitude knowledge has been flowed down from the NASA Goddard developed payload, and this requirement is to be met with a basic sensor suite and the appropriate algorithms. The algorithms selected in this work are TRIAD and an Extended Kalman Filter, both of which are placed in a simulation structure along with models for orbit propagation, spacecraft kinematics and dynamics, and sensor and reference vector models. Errors inherent from sensors, orbit …

Mapping Automotive Like Controls To A General Aviation Aircraft, Christopher G. Carvalho

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to develop fly-by-wire control laws enabling a general aviation aircraft to be flown with automotive controls, i.e. a steering wheel and gas/brake pedals. There was a six speed shifter used to change the flight mode of the aircraft. This essentially allows the pilot to have control over different aspects of the flight profile such as climb/descend or cruise. A highway in the sky was used to aid in the navigation since it is not intuitive to people without flight experience how to navigate from the sky or when to climb and descend.

Many believe …

Identifiability Of Additive, Time-Varying Actuator And Sensor Faults By State Augmentation, Jason M. Upchurch

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Faults in dynamical systems can have serious safety and reliability implications. For example, actuator and sensor faults have been factors in past incidents and mishaps in many aerospace systems. A large body of research is devoted to developing methods to detect and identify actuator and sensor faults in such systems.

One fault detection and identification menthol employs state augmentation, whereby a set of time-varying faults of interest are modeled as outputs of exogenous linear, time-invariant systems and augmented to the state of the nominal system model. The resulting model represents the system dynamics due to a particular actuator-sensor fault configuration. …

Feasibility Of Cubesat Formation Flight Using Rotation To Achieve Differential Drag, Skyler M. Shuford

Aerospace Engineering

This paper presents the results of a study conducted to understand the feasibility of CubeSat formation flight. The mechanism for separation and formation studied was differential drag, achieved by rotating the CubeSats to give them different cross-sectional areas. Intuitively, lower altitude orbits provide much higher separation effects. Although the most influential orbital effects occur with maximum and minimum cross-sectional areas, an attitude-controlled and a tumbling CubeSat may provide enough differential drag to meet separation requirements of a mission. Formation flight is possible, but due to the non-linearity of the system, gain scheduling may be the most effective method of long …

Integrated Collision Avoidance System Sensor Evaluation Final Design Project, Alex F. Graebe, Bridgette S. Kimball, Drew T. Lavoise

Mechanical Engineering

Following the development of Aircraft Collision Avoidance Technology (ACAT) by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a need arose to transition the life-saving technology to aid the general aviation community. Considering the realistic cost of implementation, it was decided that the technology should be adapted to function on any smartphone, using that device as an end-to-end solution to sense, process, and alert the pilot to imminent threats. In September of 2012, the SAS (Sense and Survive) Senior Project Team at California Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), San Luis Obispo was assigned the task of using smartphone technology to accurately sense …

Feasibility Of Microsatellite Active Debris Removal Systems, Karsten J. James

Master's Theses

Space debris has become an increasingly hazardous obstacle to continued spaceflight operations. In an effort to mitigate this problem an investigation of the feasibility of a microsatellite active debris removal system was conducted. Through proposing a novel concept of operation, utilizing a grapple-and-tug system architecture, and by analyzing each resultant mission phase in the frame of a representative example, it was found that microsatellite scale systems are capable of fulfilling the active debris removal mission. Analysis of rendezvous, docking, control and deorbit mission requirements determined that the design of a grapple-and-tug system will be driven by sizing of the propellant …

Low-Cost Imu Implementation Via Sensor Fusion Algorithms In The Arduino Environment, Brandon Mccarron

Aerospace Engineering

A multi-phase experiment was conducted at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA, to design a low-cost inertial measurement unit composed of a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope. Utilizing the growing microprocessor software environment, a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope simulated 6 degrees of freedom orientation sensing through sensor fusion. By analyzing a simple complimentary filter and a more complex Kalman filter, the outputs of each sensor were combined and took advantage of the benefits of both sensors to improved results. Gyroscopic drift was removed in the pitch and roll axes using the Kalman filter for both static and dynamic …

Uav Formation Flight Utilizing A Low Cost, Open Source Configuration, Christian W. Lopez

Master's Theses

The control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a swarm or cooperative team scenario has been a topic of great interest for well over a decade, growing steadily with the advancements in UAV technologies. In the academic community, a majority of the studies conducted rely on simulation to test developed control strategies, with only a few institutions known to have nurtured the infrastructure required to propel multiple UAV control studies beyond simulation and into experimental testing. With the Cal Poly UAV FLOC Project, such an infrastructure was created, paving the way for future experimentation with multiple UAV control systems. …

Nasa Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission Tablesat 1c, Joshua Chabot, Joseph Kelley, Michael Johnson

Honors Theses and Capstones

The NASA Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission (to be launched in 2014) consists of four spin-stabilized spacecraft flying in precise formation. The MMS spacecraft, which have wire booms up to 60 m long, are analyzed using the UNH MMS TableSat IC, a limited 3-DOF rotation (full spin, limited nutation) table top prototype of the MMS spacecraft. A PID controller is implemented on TableSat IC to observe the effects of spin rate and nutation control on the experimental satellite bus and scaled booms. Nutation and spin are implemented independently and the behavior of the test bed with and without SDP booms is …

Error Characterization Of Vision-Aided Navigation Systems, Daniel A . Marietta

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this work is to characterize the errors committed by an Image Aided Navigation (IAN) algorithm that has been developed for use as a navigation tool in GPS denied areas. The filter under study was developed by the Air Force Institute of Technology's Advanced Navigation Technology center, and has been the focus of numerous research efforts. Unfortunately, these studies have all been based on single runs or simulations, and such results may not be indicative of the true filter performance. This problem extends to IAN publications in general; no analysis of IAN based upon a sizable real world …

Adaptations And Analysis Of The Afit Noise Radar Network For Indoor Navigation, Russell D. Wilson Iv

Theses and Dissertations

After several years of development, the AFIT Noise Radar Network (NoNET) has proven to be an extremely versatile system for many standard radar functions. This pallet of capabilities includes through the wall target tracking capabilities due to its wide bandwidth and UHF operations. Utilizing White Gaussian Noise as its waveform, the NoNET can operate at much lower power levels than other comparable systems while remaining extremely covert. In an effort to explore new applications, the question arose could the NoNET provide a viable option for navigation capability in GPS denied and indoor environments? This research aims to provide proof of …