Browsing by Author "Kasula, Pavithra"
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Item Open Access Control for novel 3-DOF flight testing in a wind tunnel(IEEE, 2024-05-22) Ishola, Ademayowa A.; Whidborne, James F.; Kasula, PavithraA 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.Item Open Access Motion estimation of an aircraft model using computer vision(AIAA, 2024-01-04) Kasula, Pavithra; Whidborne, James F.; Rana, Zeeshan A.; Ishola, AdemayowaDynamic wind tunnel tests are used to investigate the flight dynamics of aircraft. Currently contact measurement systems are used which increase friction and require on-board instrumentation. A vision-based method is proposed in this paper. The method uses a sequential process of Harris corner detection, Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi tracking, and Euler angles to identify the Euler angles from a pair of cameras, one with a top-view and the other with a side-view. The method is tested by simulating a 3D CAD model for a single degree of freedom rotational motion. The results have been quantified through numerical analysis and the proposed method is analysed analytically. The developed method is effective when integrated with another method of instrumentation such as an IMU.Item Open Access Quaternion-based attitude estimation of an aircraft model using computer vision(MDPI, 2024-06-12) Kasula, Pavithra; Whidborne, James F.; Rana, Zeeshan A.Investigating aircraft flight dynamics often requires dynamic wind tunnel testing. This paper proposes a non-contact, off-board instrumentation method using vision-based techniques. The method utilises a sequential process of Harris corner detection, Kanade–Lucas–Tomasi tracking, and quaternions to identify the Euler angles from a pair of cameras, one with a side view and the other with a top view. The method validation involves simulating a 3D CAD model for rotational motion with a single degree-of-freedom. The numerical analysis quantifies the results, while the proposed approach is analysed analytically. This approach results in a 45.41% enhancement in accuracy over an earlier direction cosine matrix method. Specifically, the quaternion-based method achieves root mean square errors of 0.0101 rad/s, 0.0361 rad/s, and 0.0036 rad/s for the dynamic measurements of roll rate, pitch rate, and yaw rate, respectively. Notably, the method exhibits a 98.08% accuracy for the pitch rate. These results highlight the performance of quaternion-based attitude estimation in dynamic wind tunnel testing. Furthermore, an extended Kalman filter is applied to integrate the generated on-board instrumentation data (inertial measurement unit, potentiometer gimbal) and the results of the proposed vision-based method. The extended Kalman filter state estimation achieves root mean square errors of 0.0090 rad/s, 0.0262 rad/s, and 0.0034 rad/s for the dynamic measurements of roll rate, pitch rate, and yaw rate, respectively. This method exhibits an improved accuracy of 98.61% for the estimation of pitch rate, indicating its higher efficiency over the standalone implementation of the direction cosine method for dynamic wind tunnel testing.