The 10th IASTED International
Conference
on
Control and Applications
~CA 2008~
May 26 – 28, 2008
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
RAVEN: A Rapid Prototyping Facility for Advanced Flight Control
Abstract
This talk will present a new flight test facility known as the Real-time indoor Autonomous Vehicle test ENvironment (RAVEN). The facility was designed to test and examine a wide variety of single and multivehicle missions using both autonomous ground and air vehicles. A key feature of RAVEN is a global metrology system that yields accurate (sub-mm), high bandwidth (120Hz) position and attitude data for all vehicles in the room. This sensing system provides an ideal controlled environment for flying multiple quadrotors over extended periods of time, and it has been extensively used to experimentally validate our multi-UAV cooperative search and track algorithms and demonstrate their robustness to modeling errors.
This robust sensing system also provides enormous flexibility for rapid prototyping of many different aspects of the UAV flight control problem. For example, with this sensing system it is straightforward to configure vehicles for autonomous flight, so it is possible to use unmodified commercially available model aircraft for flight testing or to design new, unconventional platforms, such as morphing wings or flapping flight. We have successfully demonstrated that an aircraft can be designed, built, tested, modeled, and flown autonomously, all in less than 24 hours. Furthermore, because this is a low-risk implementation, it is possible to explore very aggressive aerobatic flight maneuvers, as will be needed for micro and nano air vehicles in highly constrained, e.g., urban or indoor, environments. An interesting feature of this work is that the design of the controller itself is often the limiting factor in the experiments because the flight dynamics are highly nonlinear and not well known, and they change with the flight mode and over time. These issues have motivated our current research on adaptive flight control for agile flight.
This talk will discuss the RAVEN facility and presents numerous experimental results using fixed wing UAVs, quadrotors, and a flapping wing vehicle, which all clearly demonstrate the advantages of RAVEN discussed above.
Biography of the Presenter
Dr. Jonathan P. How is a Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1987 and his S.M. and Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT in 1990 and 1993, respectively. He then studied for two years at MIT as a postdoctoral associate for the Middeck Active Control Experiment (MACE) that flew on-board the Space Shuttle Endeavour in March 1995. Prior to joining MIT in 2000, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Current research interests include the design and implementation of distributed real-time optimization algorithms to coordinate multiple autonomous vehicles in dynamic uncertain environments; and adaptive flight control to enable autonomous aerobatics. Professor How was the planning and control lead for the MIT DARPA Urban Challenge team that placed fourth in the recent race in Victorville, CA. He was the recipient of the 2002 Institute of Navigation Burka Award, is the Raymond L. Bisplinghoff Fellow for MIT Aero/Astro Department, is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a senior member of IEEE.
Photo Credits: © DONNA COVENEY/MIT
