Control design of a Super Twisting Sliding Mode Control (STW SMC), for the «Test Mass Release» phase of the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, to keep and to stabilize the Test Masses (TMs) in a highly disturbed and noisy environment.
Validation of the STW SMC through a MonteCarlo campaign, carrying out a performance analysis to show the performance of the controller, with respect of the ESA requirements, in high fidelity simulation environement.
Evaluation, design and implementation of a First Order SMC, as comparison with the STW SMC in high fidelity simulation environement.
Evaluation and design of an equivalent control of the STW SMC to show better performance with high disturbances and noises.
Involved People: Nicoletta Bloise, Leonardo Capicchiano. Scientific coordination: Elisa Capello.
ASTIB Consortium: Iron Bird Tests
This project concerns the development of a Flight Mechanics Simulation Computer (FMSC) able to provide real-time aircraft simulation, in order to verify equipment behavior in a controlled environment.
The FMSC implements a simplified low-order flexible aircraft model based on a mixed Newtonian-Lagrangian aprroach. This permits to evaluate the flexible aircraft response to piloting tasks or an external gust, mantaining the entire formulation simple.
The FMSC also contains some sensor models such as: wing accelerometers, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a GPS. This permits to represent more realistically the simulator outputs for the equipment testing.
Also the FMSC provides real-time calculation of each control surface Hinge Moments in order to perform actuator testing.
AG2 Consortium: Gust Load Alleviation
This project concerns the definition of the control laws for Gust Load Alleviation (GLA) puorposes for an aircraft with unconventional tip surfaces.
A State Observer is used to estimate the states required for the control law definition from the states actually measured on the aircraft. Then, an H∞ optimal controller is designed to control the flexible structure behaviour and thus to reduce the dynamic loads generated by a discrete gust disturbance.
Validation of the control laws on wind tunnel tests, performed at Politecnico di Milano by the group of Prof. Sergio Ricci (image on the left: courtesy by Prof. Ricci's group, scaled aircraft model in the wind tunnel of Politecnico di Milano)
Involved People: Nicoletta Bloise, Simone Malisani. Scientific coordination: Elisa Capello (AG2 Project), Giorgio Guglieri (ASTIB Project).
A consensus problem is proposed for second-order multi-agent systems with heterogeneous mass distribution.
Design of a coordinated control of multi-agent spacecraft with heterogeneous mass distribution, where movable systems are included.
Only position measurements are available and undirected graphs are considered, i.e. information on the system parameters are not required.
The main result is the achievement of the consensus for heterogeneous second-order multi-agent systems, if the graph of the overall system is undirected and connected, even if a flexible model is considered.
Since heterogeneous properties have no effects on consensus convergence for first-order integrator, a sufficient condition for the consensus of second-order multi-agent systems is also given with some local information exchange.
The proposed methodology is applied to an attitude control for space pointing maneuvers.
Involved People: Elisa Capello in collaboration with Prof. Yasumasa Fujisaki (Osaka University).