Airplane trajectory expansion for dynamics inversion

In aircraft research, there is keen interest in the procedure of determining the set of controls required to perform a maneuver from a definition of the trajectory. This is called the inverse problem. It has been proposed that if a complete set of states and state time derivatives can be derived fro...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Munro, Bruce C.
Other Authors: Aerospace Engineering
Format: Others
Language:en
Published: Virginia Tech 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10919/43640
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-07102009-040551/
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Summary:In aircraft research, there is keen interest in the procedure of determining the set of controls required to perform a maneuver from a definition of the trajectory. This is called the inverse problem. It has been proposed that if a complete set of states and state time derivatives can be derived from a trajectory then a model-following solution can allocate the controls necessary for the maneuver. This paper explores the problem of finding the complete state definition and provides a solution that requires numerical differentiation, fixed point iteration and a Newton's method solution to nonlinear equations. It considers trajectories that are smooth, piecewise smooth, and noise ridden. The resulting formulation was coded into a FORTRAN program. When tested against simple smooth maneuvers, the program output was very successful but demonstrated the limitations imposed by the assumptions and approximations in the development. === Master of Science