DOD-Navy-Naval Surface Warfare Center
Co-Principal Investigator
9 September 2020 – 8 September 2021
Total award $500,000
This research will develop and analyze methods to support the positioning and navigation of hypersonic vehicle platforms in contested environments, and develop and analyze the effectiveness of an adaptive control and observer framework to address elastic-body nonlinear hypersonic vehicle dynamics. Furthermore, this research effort will include some development of suitable curricula for developing the next generation hypersonic workforce.
This research will be supported by recent advances in optomechanical accelerometer technologies and interferometric vision technologies to provide alternative positioning and navigation solutions for hypersonic vehicles. Optomechanical accelerometers for onboard adaptive guidance and control applications because these sensing technologies are completely immune to high frequency aerodynamic noise disturbances that usually corrupt other capacitance-based accelerometers. The reason is the mechanical characteristics of the device act as a passive low-pass filter. Additional advantages include the thermal stability of the materials (glass), integrated optics, and the small form factor. The research will also be supported by a nonlinear dynamic inversion adaptive control architecture with a control allocation scheme. These ideas avoid the use of gain scheduling and can are robust with respect to parametric uncertainty or slowly time-varying parameters. Additionally, nonlinear observers and bounding function methods will be used to prove the stability of the control laws.
This research will leverage the past and current autonomy and adaptive flight controls research performed by Dr Valasek; the smart sensing technologies and computational vision research per-formed by Dr Majji; and the technical expertise in precision optical metrology, laser interferometry, and novel optomechanical inertial sensors researched performed by Dr Guzman. The out-comes will include an optimal set of design parameters for a sensing system for onboard adaptive guidance and control applications for hypersonic flight vehicles. This research effort will also leverage the past experience of Dr Hurtado, who as Associate Dean in the College of Engineering, developed several undergraduate-level, graduate-level, and extra-curricular programs and led them through the Texas A&M University approval process.
This research will support the Department of Defense efforts on enabling hypersonic vehicles to provide responsive, long-range, strike options against distant, defended, and time-critical threats.
Working with me on this project are:
Graduate Students:
-Kameron Eves , Ph.D. AERO