Real Time Adaptive Navigation and Control of Highly Nonlinear Autonomous Systems

United States Navy Office of Naval Research
1 July 1997 – 30 June 2000
Co-P.I.’s John L. Junkins and Donald T. Ward
Total award $563,649

The goal of this program is to investigate novel and highly advanced technologies which will enable autonomous systems with high levels of uncertainty in the presence of noise and unbounded disturbances to achieve breakthrough combat capabilities in future high threat environments. Specific enabling technologies being researched by the collective Texas A&M team on this program include Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) control effector actuation, vision based automatic landing systems, and intelligent autonomous flight controllers. The broad class of system includes autonomous underwater vehicles, robotic land vehicles, and Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV) such as the type pictured above, which is the vehicle type for this research.

Specific topic areas being researched include:

• Robust nonlinear adaptive control.
• Online, real-time, nonlinear system identification in the presence of noise.
• Intelligent flight directors.
• Extremal mapping.
• Fighter agility metrics for UCAV’s.

Working with me on this program are Graduate Research Assistants:

• Wei Chen
• Praveen Joshi
• David M. Smith