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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 111 - Reno, Nevada - March 2013
Agenda Location	7 SUBCOMMITTEE E – FLIGHT, PROPULSION, AND AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE CONTROL 7.2 Condor Retrospective
Title	Condor Retrospective
Presenter	Tony Lambregts
Affiliation	FAA
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Condor was a very large Autonomous High Altitude long endurance UAV Technology Demonstration Program funded mostly by DARPA in the 183-1990 period. In its final production incarnation it was intended mainly as a forward radar observation and intelligence gathering platform to provide early warning in case of a sneak attack on the Navy fleet. Condor featured an all composite structure, a high aspect ratio laminar flow wing and high efficiency dual stage turbocharged internal combustion engine system driving 2-speed propeller. Condor was designed for 150 hours of endurance. When the cold war ended, its purpose went away and the program was cancelled in 1990 after 5 development flight and 3 mission oriented flights, the longest flight was ~58 hours and the highest altitude reached was ~68,000 ft. All flight operations were conducted using the autonomous/automatic flight control modes, including all take offs and landings, managed by the mission sequencer. The presentation mainly discussed the development of the autonomous flight control system, which used the Total Energy Control concept to provide functionally integrated vertical flight path and airspeed control and the Total Heading Control concept to provide integrated roll/yaw control. The control laws, sensor processing and mission management were implemented in a dual active standby fail operational Mission/Flight Control Computer and Avionics system. It used analytical redundancy techniques along with other fault detection technique to achieve fail operational capability with ~90% fault coverage. Smart electro-mechanical control surface actuators were developed for the program. The Total Energy and Total Heading control algorithms provided decoupled command responses at low altitude and adaptation to the slow engine dynamics at high altitude to assure safe and stable control under all flight conditions. The program included extensive aeroservoelastic airplane model development and structural mode filtering due to the extreme flexibility of the wing. The flight test program experienced number of a failure conditions, including 2 engine failures,2 instances of control surface actuator failure, an MLS approach and landing guidance system hardover. In addition conditions were encountered with strong mountain wave activity and high wind conditions resulting in negative groundspeed. All of these conditions were successfully handled by the autonomous control system, without any intervention from the ground controller. The fight test program demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of the control algorithms. Only one relatively minor flight control design change was made. No undamped modes, or conditions of poor flight control performance were encountered at any flight conditions.