Control for novel 3-DOF flight testing in a wind tunnel

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.