(DEPSCOR) ON-THE-FLY FLIGHT TEST MANEUVER OPTIMIZATION AND NONLINEAR MODELING OF HYPERSONIC SYSTEMS
Abstract
The proposed research aims to enable robust and high-precision control of hypersonic flight systems through a unified testing and evaluation (TandE) approach that optimizes both the design of flight test maneuvers and the extraction of reliable control-oriented flight models. Existing hypersonic flight test approaches purposefully restrict attention to the dynamics of small perturbations and are unable to reliably capture the complex nonlinear physics of hypersonic flight. In the proposed effort, we will formulate a TandE framework that optimizes flight test maneuvers and extracts nonlinear control-oriented models relevant for high-precision control of hypersonic systems, while guaranteeing airworthiness during testing. To do so, we will exploit mathematical techniques from data-driven dynamical systems and robust control theory for nonlinear modeling, uncertainty quantification, and stability analysis. Quantification of the uncertainty present in the model extracted from flight data is a key feature of our approach, as it bridges the gap between the limits of physics based modeling and the mathematics of robust control. This enables the design of flight test maneuvers that target data collection at conditions that are most likely to drive down model uncertainty and guarantee flight stability during testing. An on the fly approach is also proposed, which will involve recursively refining the flight model with incoming data and re-optimizing the flight test maneuvers during the flight test itself. A combination of existing numerical data sets and high fidelity simulation software will be used to design, validate, and benchmark the proposed methods. The proposed research objectives are summarized as follows. (1) Extract control-oriented models from flight data that capture the nonlinear dynamics of hypersonic flight. (2) Design efficient flight test maneuvers that guarantee airworthiness. (3) Develop a recursive testing strategy that performs model extraction and flight test maneuver optimization on the fly during flight tests.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 07, 2023
- Source ID
- FA95502110213
Entities
People
- Ryan James Caverly
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- Regents of the University of Minnesota