Browsing by Author "Ishola, Ademayowa A."

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    An aircraft-manipulator system for virtual flight testing of longitudinal flight dynamics
    (MDPI, 2024-12-15) Ishola, Ademayowa A.; Whidborne, James F.; Tang, Gilbert
    A virtual flight test is the process of flying an aircraft model inside a wind tunnel in a manner that replicates free-flight. In this paper, a 3-DOF aircraft-manipulator system is proposed that can be used for longitudinal dynamics virtual flight tests. The system consists of a two rotational degrees-of-freedom manipulator arm with an aircraft wind tunnel model attached to the third joint. This aircraft-manipulator system is constrained to operate for only the longitudinal motion of the aircraft. Thus, the manipulator controls the surge and heave of the aircraft whilst the pitch is free to rotate and can be actively controlled by means of an all-moving tailplane of the aircraft if required. In this initial study, a flight dynamics model of the aircraft is used to obtain dynamic response trajectories of the aircraft in free-flight. A model of the coupled aircraft-manipulator system developed using the Euler method is presented, and PID controllers are used to control the manipulator so that the aircraft follows the free-flight trajectory (with respect to the air). The inverse kinematics are used to produce the reference joint angles for the manipulator. The system is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink and a virtual flight test trajectory is compared with a free-flight test trajectory, demonstrating the potential of the proposed system for virtual flight tests.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Control for novel 3-DOF flight testing in a wind tunnel
    (IEEE, 2024-05-22) Ishola, Ademayowa A.; Whidborne, James F.; Kasula, Pavithra
    A long standing ambition in the aerospace industry is to flight test aircraft in wind tunnels. We propose a robotic manipulator system that can be operated with an aircraft wind tunnel model that replicates the longitudinal dynamics of the aircraft in free flight. A nonlinear aircraft-manipulator dynamics model developed with the Euler-Lagrange method is combined with the inverse kinematics to produce the relative joint angles for the robot manipulator to reproduce free flight trajectories in the wind tunnel working section. Simple PI control is used for the manipulator joint control to replicate the translational degrees of freedom, whilst the aircraft pitch is controlled via the aircraft elevator. The proposed scheme is tested in simulation and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.