A Software-in-the-Loop Implementation of Adaptive Formation Control for Fixed-Wing UAVs

This paper discusses the design and software-in-theloop implementation of adaptive formation controllers for fixedwing unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) with parametric uncertainty in their structure, namely uncertain mass and inertia. In fact, when aiming at autonomous flight, such parameters cannot assumed to be known as they might vary during the mission(e.g.depending on the payload). Modeling and autopilot design for such autonomous fixed-wing UAVs are presented. The modeling is implemented in Matlab, while the autopilot is based on ArduPilot, a popular open-source autopilot suite. Specifically, the ArduP ilot functionalities are emulated in Matlab according to the Ardupilot documentation and code, which allows us to perform software-in-the-loop simulations of teams of UAVs embedded with actual autopilot protocols. An overview of realtime path planning, trajectory tracking and formation control resulting from the proposed platform is given. The software-inthe-loop simulations show the capability of achieving different UAV formations while handling uncertain mass and inertia.

Nonsingular Terminal Sliding Mode Control With Ultra-Local Model and Single Input Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Logic Control for Pitch Control of Wind Turbines

As wind energy is becoming one of the fastestgrowing renewable energy resources,controlling large-scale wind turbines remains a challenging task due to its system model nonlinearities and high external uncertainties.The main goal of the current work is to propose an intelligent control of the wind turbine system without the need for model identification.For this purpose,a novel model-independent nonsingular terminal slidingmode control(MINTSMC)using the basic principles of the ultralocal model(ULM)and combined with the single input interval type-2 fuzzy logic control(SIT2-FLC)is developed for non-linear wind turbine pitch angle control.In the suggested control framework,the MINTSMC scheme is designed to regulate the wind turbine speed rotor,and a sliding-mode(SM)observer is adopted to estimate the unknown phenomena of the ULM.The auxiliary SIT2-FLC is added in the model-independent control structure to improve the rotor speed regulation and compensate for the SM observation estimation error.Extensive examinations and comparative analyses were made using a real-time softwarein-the-loop(RT-SiL)based on the dSPACE 1202 board to appraise the efficiency and applicability of the suggested modelindependent scheme in a real-time testbed.

Design of an Integrated SITL and HITL Simulation System for the Control of a Loitering Aerial Vehicle

An investigation into the aircraft flight simulation and control system is presented in this paper. The study was firstly focused on the establishment of an integrated hardware-in-the-loop（HITL） platform for aircraft flight simulation based on MATLAB/Simulink ＋ dSPACE. The platform combines the abundant software and hardware resources of dSPACE simulation platform to simulate the flight attitude of an aircraft in six-DOF （ degree of freedom） motion. Based on the platform, the study was then focused on the flight numerical simulation by taking a loitering aerial vehicle as an example. An aircraft mathematical model was created for a modular design and off-line numerical simulation based on MATLAB/Simulink. Finally, the study was focused on the control system design of the loitering aerial vehicle and conduct of an HITL simulation experiment for the vehicle pitch control. The experiment verifies the system design and control effectiveness. Research results show that the dSPACE simulation system provides a real time good experimental platform to improve the efficiency of study and development of a flight control system.

Identification and Modeling of Automotive Electrical Parking Brake System for SiL Simulation

To evaluate the software behavior of the electronic control unit （ECU） of automotive electrical parking brake （EPB）, a software- in-the-loop （SiL） simulation system is built. The EPB is simulated by ARX （auto-regressive with auxiliary input） model, ARMAX （auto-regressive moving average with auxiliary input） model, and NNARMAX （neural network ARMAX） model. By system identification, the ARX（3,4,2）, ARX（4,4,2）, ARMAX（3,3,1,1）, and ARMAX（4,4,3,2） models are derived. Validation results show that the four-order ARMAX model and the NNARMAX model better simulate the actuator of the EPB.