AEM 5333 – Design, Build, Model, Simulate, Test and Fly Small Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles
Syllabus, Spring 2013
Course Information
Times: 2:30-3:45pm ,T,Th (01/22/2013 - 05/10/2013)
Locations: 211 Akerman Hall
URL: http://www.aem.umn.edu/courses/aem5333/spring2013
Prof. Bérénice Mettler, 226 Akerman Hall,
Office Hours: 3:45-4:45pm T,Th (other hours by appointment)
Brian Taylor, 130C Akerman Hall,
Office Hours: T 1:30-2:30pm (other hours by appointment)
Textbooks
· R. W. Beard and T. W. McLain, Small Unmanned Aircraft: Theory and Practice, Princeton University Press, 2012.
· M.V. Cook, Flight Dynamics Principles, Second Edition, Elsevier Ltd., Oxford, UK 2007
· B.L. Stevens and F.L. Lewis, Aircraft Control and Simulation, John Wiley & Sons, 1992, ISBN 0-471-61397-5
· Matlab and Simulink User’s Guides
Additional References
The following texts focus on the systems, missions and history.
· J. Gundlach, Designing Unmanned Aircraft Systems: A Comprehensive Approach, AIAA, 2012.
· R. Austin, Unmanned Aircraft Systems: UAVS Design, Development and Deployment, Wiley, 2011.
· L.R. Newcome, Unmanned aviation: a brief history of unmanned aerial vehicles, AIAA, 2004.
Introduction
Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are defined as aircraft, which fly without a human operator onboard. In recent years, there has been significant interest in the design and operation of small UAVs. It is important that the engineering workforce understands all aspects of UAV design and operation. Training this workforce requires rethinking of how aerospace engineers are educated since small UAVs are not simply miniaturized versions of large aircraft. Similarly, the design cycle for small UAVs will likely be in terms of month instead of years. Therefore rapid prototyping software tools are necessary to both improve and speed up the design, testing, and real-time implementation.
Course Description
The course is concerned with the design, building, modeling, simulation, testing and flying of UAVs. This semester the focus is on the use of rapid prototyping software tools for vehicle modeling, guidance, navigation, and flight control, real-time implementation, hardware-in-the-loop simulation and flight tests. The prerequisites for the course will be AEM 2301 Mechanics of Flight, AEM 4601 Instrumentation Lab, AEM 4202 Aerodynamics, and AEM 4303W Flight Dynamics and Control.
Students will get hands-on experience of the entire UAV design cycle. Students will be assigned to groups. Each person in a group will learn one or more of the following skills:
1. Translate mission level specifications and requirements into vehicle level sizing, performance, reliability, and safety specifications.
2. System level design requirements for UAV systems, system architectures and cost tradeoffs.
3. Select actuators, sensors, communication systems, microcontrollers, and real-time computers to meet system level specifications.
4. Develop equations of motion for small UAVs from first principles and system identification techniques.
5. Develop linear and nonlinear models of a small UAV from the equations of motion and simulate their response to control inputs and disturbances.
6. Analyze the stability and control characteristics of the aircraft.
7. Use open-loop flight test data to identify and validate the UAV model based on first principles modeling.
8. Design flight control laws using feedback to achieve desire dynamic characteristics of the vehicle.
9. Implement and test feedback control algorithms in linear and nonlinear UAV simulation models.
10. Generate vehicle state information using Kalman filtering. An overview of Kalman filtering, GPS, inertial measurement units (IMUs), aircraft navigation and guidance will be provided.
11. Integrate guidance and navigation algorithms into the nonlinear UAV simulation.
12. Implement guidance, navigation and feedback control algorithms in real-time and verify that they execute properly in software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop simulations.
13. Perform closed-loop flight tests with real-time implementation of guidance, navigation and feedback control algorithms.
14. Compare closed-loop experimental flight test data with simulation data.
15. Redesign and flight test of flight control laws.
The course objective is for students to design, simulate, test and fly inner and outer-loop flight control laws for the candidate UAV. The control algorithms will be updated and redesigned based on software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop and flight tests. Students will work in groups of 5 or 6 to accomplish these objectives.
The course will not follow any of the texts directly and may vary from the syllabus. The lectures are divided relatively evenly into actual lecture sessions and interactive discussion session. For interactive discussion sessions, material will be assigned ahead of time and discussed in class.
The homework and reports will require the students access to a computer account to use Matlab, Simulink, Control System Toolbox, Aerospace Blockset and Simulink Real-Time Workshop software products.
The course website is http://www.aem.umn.edu/courses/aem5333/spring2013/. It contains course announcements, syllabus, homework and solutions, design project information and lecture notes.
Student Responsibilities
The course will meet in one group for lectures every Monday and Wednesday. Regular attendance at lectures is expected. You are responsible for any course material, schedule changes, announcements, etc. discussed in class. It is mandatory that you study the assigned material. Participation will be accounted for in the final grade.
Scholastic Conduct
University and IT policies on scholastic conduct can be found on the web at http://www.it.umn.edu/students/policies/index.html. These policies will be strictly enforced.
Grades
The class is design for students to work in groups on the UAV projects. Homework will be assigned and account for 30% of the final grade. Homework will be collected and part of them graded. The homework assignments will state if they are to be done individually or as a group. For group homeworks, all the group members will receive the same grade. All lectures will be based on the assumption that you have completed the homework. The midterm report will account for 20%, the final report 30% of the grade and 20% of an individual’s grade will be assessed by their group. The cumulative score will be calculated, and grades will be assigned according to a scheme such as the following:
Score Grade
90--100 A
80--89 B
70--79 C
60--69 D
below 60 F
I reserve the right to change the criteria to reflect the overall performance of the class.
Course Outline
The content of the course and organization, including a list of the material that will be discussed in the interactive sessions, is available in the separated document entitled “Content_AEM5333”. In addition a tentative schedule, describing the weekly topics and available reading material and resources, will is available in “Schedule_AEM5333”.
Required Background
The prerequisites course for aerospace students are AEM 2301 Mechanics of Flight, AEM 4601 Instrumentation Lab, AEM 4202 Aerodynamics, AEM 4303W Flight Dynamics and Control. For electrical engineering, mechanical engineering or computer science students, courses in dynamic system modeling, controls, programming and real-time systems are required. Students who have taken the prerequisites are assumed to be to program in C, MATLAB and Simulink, and are familiar with serial communication, sampling, acquiring data using an A/D convertor and generating output data using D/A conversion.
Hardware and Software Requirements
MATLAB/Simulink will be the main software environment for the course. Students will also be required to develop programs in C and integrate those subroutines into the MATLAB/Simulink environment. The University of Minnesota has a number of MATLAB/Simulink toolboxes (see www1.umn.edu/adcs/software/matlab/toolboxes.html). Two UAV simulation stations will available for the two groups to implement and test their algorithms. It is expected that students have access to Matlab/Simulink and will be able to design and test their controllers both on their own or IT labs computers and the UAV simulation stations.
The students will work with an Ultra Stick radio controlled airplane.. The avionics hardware will include a microNAV sensor from Crossbow (Note that this may need to be replaced since Crossbow stopped manufacturing this sensor earlier this year), Phytec MPC-5200 microcontroller, PWM actuators for the surfaces, radio-modem, real-time data-logger, r/c planes with batteries, engine, radio, speed controller, etc.