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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 102 - Niagara Falls - October 2008
Agenda Location	4 GENERAL COMMITTEE TECHNICAL SESSION 4.2 Government Agencies Summary Reports 4.2.3 US Air Force 4.2.3.1 Air Force Research Lab
Title	Air Force Research Lab
Presenter	Dave Doman
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	The Control Science Center of Excellence at the Air Force Research Laboratory is focused on control related research in two areas: cooperative control of unmanned air vehicles and micro air vehicle flight control. The current research in UAV cooperative control is focused on providing the ability to perform ISR tasks in cluttered urban terrain, identify and tag targets for separate shooters and communicate with special operations personnel on the ground. Flight tests utilizing a small and micro-UAV have demonstrated the ability of multiple UAVs to accomplish the objectives outlined above. Research in space-access has focused on providing fault-tolerant autonomous capabilities for all flight phases. Space access and hypersonic vehicle research is being replaced by efforts directed toward micro air vehicle (MAV) flight control. An MAV laboratory has been created that uses a motion capture system to passively extract inertial measurements. Off-board real-time computers process the inertial measurements and telemeter actuator commands to MAVs via an RF transmitter. RC class quadrotors and helicopters have been tested for the purpose of debugging hardware, software and communication links; however, the purpose of the system is to enable flight control experiments involving flapping wing micro air vehicles with insect-like maneuverability. A first principles control-oriented modeling effort has been initiated to develop control strategies for flapping-wing MAVs. Control laws developed for the first principle-based models will be tested using a hardware-in-the-loop simulation that is designed to drive a dynamic simulation of the MAV using forces and moments measured by a force balance to drive the simulation model. This arrangement allows one to assess the suitability of control laws designed from a simplified inviscid quasi-steady aerodynamic model when applied to the actual vehicle where unsteady and viscous aerodynamic effects are present, but without incurring a large computational burden associated with the solution of the Navier Stokes equations.