Spacecraft attitude maneuver control using two parallel mounted 3-DOF spherical actuators

A parallel configuration using two 3-degree-of-freedom (3-DOF) spherical electromag-netic momentum exchange actuators is investigated for large angle spacecraft attitude maneuvers. First, the full dynamic equations of motion for the spacecraft system are derived by the Newton-Euler method. To facilitate computation, virtual gimbal coordinate frames are established. Second, a nonlinear control law in terms of quaternions is developed via backstepping method. The pro-posed control law compensates the coupling torques arising from the spacecraft rotation, and is robust against the external disturbances. Then, the singularity problem is analyzed. To avoid sin-gularities, a modified weighed Moore-Pseudo inverse velocity steering law based on null motion is proposed. The weighted matrices are carefully designed to switch the actuators and redistribute the control torques. The null motion is used to reorient the rotor away from the tilt angle saturation state. Finally, numerical simulations of rest-to-rest maneuvers are performed to validate the effec-tiveness of the proposed method.     

冗余度柔性机器人动态响应主动控制

研究了具有压电作动器与应变传感器的冗余度柔性机器人的振动主动控制问题。建立了该离散时变动力学系统的状态空间表达式。根据离散量小值原理设计了LQR最优控制律，并提出了一种状态估计的近似方法。平面3R冗余度柔性机器人的仿真算例表明，采用这种主动控制方法可使冗余度柔性机器人的动力学特性得到显改善。     

Closed-loop dynamic control allocation for aircraft with multiple actuators

A closed-loop control allocation method is proposed for a class of aircraft with multiple actuators. Nonlinear dynamic inversion is used to design the baseline attitude controller and derive the desired moment increment. And a feedback loop for the moment increment produced by the deflections of actuators is added to the angular rate loop, then the error between the desired and actual moment increment is the input of the dynamic control allocation. Subsequently, the stability of the closed-loop dynamic control allocation system is analyzed in detail. Especially, the closedloop system stability is also analyzed in the presence of two types of actuator failures: loss of effectiveness and lock-in-place actuator failures, where a fault detection subsystem to identify the actuator failures is absent. Finally, the proposed method is applied to a canard rotor/wing (CRW) aircraft model in fixed-wing mode, which has multiple actuators for flight control. The nonlinear simulation demonstrates that this method can guarantee the stability and tracking performance whether the actuators are healthy or fail.     

Reconfigurable fault-tolerant control for supersonic missiles with actuator failures under actuation redundancy

Aircraft undergoing actuator failures into under-actuation have been seldom studied in literature. Aiming at addressing actuator failures of Total Loss of Effectiveness (TLOE) as well as Partial Loss of Effectiveness (PLOE) resulting in different system actuations, reconfigurable Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) is proposed for supersonic wingless missiles under actuation redundancy. The under-actuated system of TLOE failure patterns is solved by transformation to cascade systems through a ‘shape variable’. Meanwhile, actuator TLOE faults of different unknown failure patterns from proper actuation to under-actuation are accommodated by a reconfigurable adaptive law on a multiple-model basis. The backstepping technique with the Extended State Observer (ESO) method adopted as a basic strategy is applied to an established symmetric coupled missile system with actuator PLOE faults, modeling errors, and external disturbances. Additionally, the nonlinear saturation characteristics of actuators are settled by an auxiliary system with the Nussbaum function technique. The stability of the control system is analyzed and proven through Lyapunov theory. Numerical simulations are implemented in the presences of aerodynamic uncertainties, gust disturbance, and actuator failures. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method with satisfactory tracking performance and actuator fault tolerance capacity.     

辅助进气激励器强化喷流混合的数值模拟

对采用高动量的辅助进气激励器和“常规”激励器强化的高速、大尺度喷流混合进行了数值模拟研究。对比了辅助进气激励器和“常规”激励器吹气射流对流向涡、喷流拍动、阻塞面积的影响,分析了合成射流强化喷流混合的流动滞后现象。结果表明:合成射流强化喷流混合中的辅助进气激励器在吹气时间、吹气动量、峰值动量比方面要明显优于“常规”激励器。合成射流强化喷流混合由激励器迟滞和流场迟滞两部分组成。“常规”激励器和辅助进气激励器射流峰值动量都滞后于活塞峰值速度时刻19.5%，流场滞后峰值动量时刻5%左右。相比于“常规”激励器,采用辅助进气激励器的“小突片”堵塞面积较大,强化喷流混合的效果更好。      

A two-stage approach for managing actuators redundancy and its application to fault tolerant flight control

In safety-critical systems such as transportation aircraft, redundancy of actuators is introduced to improve fault tolerance. How to make the best use of remaining actuators to allow the system to continue achieving a desired operation in the presence of some actuators failures is the main subject of this paper. Considering that many dynamical systems, including flight dynamics of a transportation aircraft, can be expressed as an input affine nonlinear system, a new state representation is adopted here where the output dynamics are related with virtual inputs associated with the intended operation. This representation, as well as the distribution matrix associated with the effectiveness of the remaining operational actuators, allows us to define different levels of fault tolerant governability with respect to actuators’ failures. Then, a two-stage control approach is developed, leading first to the inversion of the output dynamics to get nominal values for the virtual inputs and then to the solution of a linear quadratic(LQ) problem to compute the solicitation of each operational actuator. The proposed approach is applied to the control of a transportation aircraft which performs a stabilized roll maneuver while a partial failure appears. Two fault scenarios are considered and the resulting performance of the proposed approach is displayed and discussed.     

Turbulent boundary layer separation control using plasma actuator at Reynolds number 2000000

An experimental investigation was conducted to evaluate the effect of symmetrical plasma actuators on turbulent boundary layer separation control at high Reynolds number. Compared with the traditional control method of plasma actuator, the whole test model was made of aluminum and acted as a covered electrode of the symmetrical plasma actuator. The experimental study of plasma actuators' effect on surrounding air, a canonical zero-pressure gradient turbulent boundary, was carried out using particle image velocimetry(PIV) and laser Doppler velocimetry(LDV) in the 0.75 m × 0.75 m low speed wind tunnel to reveal the symmetrical plasma actuator characterization in an external flow. A half model of wing-body configuration was experimentally investigated in the  3.2 m low speed wind tunnel with a six-component strain gauge balance and PIV. The results show that the turbulent boundary layer separation of wing can be obviously suppressed and the maximum lift coefficient is improved at high Reynolds number with the symmetrical plasma actuator. It turns out that the maximum lift coefficient increased by approximately 8.98% and the stall angle of attack was delayed by approximately 2° at Reynolds number2 ×10~6. The effective mechanism for the turbulent separation control by the symmetrical plasma actuators is to induce the vortex near the wing surface which could create the relatively largescale disturbance and promote momentum mixing between low speed flow and main flow regions.     

Adaptive Integral-type Sliding Mode Control for Spacecraft Attitude Maneuvering Under Actuator Stuck Failures

A fault tolerant control (FTC) design technique against actuator stuck faults is investigated using integral-type sliding mode control (ISMC) with application to spacecraft attitude maneuvering control system. The principle of the proposed FTC scheme is to design an integral-type sliding mode attitude controller using on-line parameter adaptive updating law to compensate for the effects of stuck actuators. This adaptive law also provides both the estimates of the system parameters and external disturbances such that a prior knowledge of the spacecraft inertia or boundedness of disturbances is not required. Moreover, by including the integral feedback term, the designed controller can not only tolerate actuator stuck faults, but also compensate the disturbances with constant components. For the synthesis of controller, the fault time, patterns and values are unknown in advance, as motivated from a practical spacecraft control application. Complete stability and performance analysis are presented and illustrative simulation results of application to a spacecraft show that high precise attitude control with zero steady-error is successfully achieved using various scenarios of stuck failures in actuators.     

Analysis of reaction torque-based control of a redundant free-floating space robot

Owing to the dynamics coupling between a free-floating base and a manipulator,the non-stationary base of a space robot will face the issue of base disturbance due to a manipulator's motion.The reaction torque acted on the satellite base's centroid is an important index to measure the satellite base's disturbance.In this paper,a comprehensive analysis of the reaction torque is made,and a novel way to derive the analytical form of the reaction torque is proposed.In addition,the reaction torque null-space is derived,in which the manipulator's joint motion is dynamically decoupled from the motion of the satellite base,and its novel expression demonstrates the equivalence between the reaction torque null-space and the reaction null-space.Furthermore,the reaction torque acted as an optimization index can be utilized to achieve satellite base disturbance minimization in the generalized Jacobian-based end-effector Cartesian path tracking task.Besides,supposing that the redundant degrees of freedom are abundant to achieve reaction torque-based active control,the reaction torque can be used to realize satellite base attitude control,that is,base attitude adjustment or maintenance.Moreover,because reaction torque-based control is a second-order control scheme,joint torque minimization can be regarded as the optimization task in reaction torque-based active or in-active control.A real-time simulation system of a 7-DOF space robot under Linux/RTAI is developed to verify and test the feasibility and reliability of the proposed ideas.Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that the corresponding analysis about the reaction torque is correct and the proposed methods are feasible.     

MMAE-based control redistribution applied to the VISTA F-16

A novel control technique, termed control redistribution, is presented and applied in conjunction with multiple model adaptive estimation (MMAE) to the variable in-night stability test aircraft (VISTA) F-16, to detect and compensate for sensor and/or actuator failures. This ad hoc method redistributes control commands (that would normally be sent to failed actuators) to the nonfailed actuators, accomplishing the same control action on the aircraft. Dither is considered to help disambiguate failures in the longitudinal and lateral-directional channels. Detection of both single-actuator and single-sensor failures is considered. Failures are demonstrated detectable in less than 1 s, with an aircraft output nearly identical to that anticipated from a fully functional aircraft in the same environment