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This brief describes the application of direct and indirect model reference adaptive control to a lightweight low-cost quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle platform. A baseline trajectory tracking controller is augmented by an adaptive controller. The approach is validated using simulations and flight tested in an indoor test facility. The adaptive controller is found to offer increased robustness to parametric uncertainties. In particular, it is found to be effective in mitigating the effects of a loss-of-thrust anomaly, which may occur due to component failure or physical damage. The design of the adaptive controller is presented, followed by a comparison of flight test results using the existing linear and augmented adaptive controllers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This letter addresses the performance study of an adaptive controller in the presence of gain and delay uncertainties. The nonlinearities in the controller presented here do not allow an analytical study of the effect of uncertainties on performance. A numerical study is done instead using the sampling, learning, prediction, and optimization capabilities of the software Global Optimization, Sensitivity and Uncertainty in Models (GoSUM). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this brief, a fault detection and isolation (FDI) method is developed for aircraft engines by utilizing nonlinear adaptive estimation techniques. The fault diagnosis method follows a general architecture developed in previous papers, where a fault detection estimator is used for fault detection, and a bank of nonlinear adaptive fault isolation estimators are employed to determine the particular fault type/location. Each isolation estimator is designed based on the functional structure of a particular fault type under consideration. The general FDI architecture is applied to a realistic nonlinear aircraft engine model recently developed by NASA Researchers. In addition, the robustness of the fault diagnostic method with respect to normal engine health degradation is enhanced by adaptive thresholds and adaptive approximation techniques, hence accurate diagnostic performance is maintained while the engine continues to degrade over its lifetime. Some representative simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the robust nonlinear FDI method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, robust adaptive boundary control is developed for a class of flexible string-type systems under unknown time-varying disturbance. The dynamics of the string system is represented by a nonhomogeneous hyperbolic partial differential equation (PDE) and two ordinary differential equations. Boundary control is proposed at the right boundary of the string based on the original distributed parameter system model (PDE) to suppress the vibration excited by the external unknown disturbance. Adaptive control is designed to compensate the system parametric uncertainty. With the proposed robust adaptive boundary control, all the signals in the closed-loop system are guaranteed to be uniformly ultimately bounded. The state of the string system is proven to converge to a small neighborhood of zero by appropriately choosing design parameters. Simulations are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]