Robustness Study of a Dynamic Inversion Control Law for a High Performance Aircraft

In the design of °ight control system modeling uncertainties in the form of param-eter variations is one of the major problems. It is even more critical for high performance aircrafts,since such aircrafts are purposefully designed unstable to enhance their performance (especially ma-neuverability). Hence the °ight control system needs to be quite e®ective in both assuring accurate tracking of pilot commands, while simultaneously assuring overall stability of the aircraft. In addi-tion, the control system must also be su±ciently robust to cater for possible parameter variations and inaccuracies . The primary aim of this paper is to carry out a robustness study of a dynamic inversion based nonlinear control design for a high performance aircraft, which has been developed recently [1].

Energy-insensitive Guidance of Solid Motor Propelled Long Range Flight Vehicles Using MPSP and Dynamic Inversion

A energy-insensitive explicit guidance design is proposed in this paper by appending newlydeveloped nonlinear model predictive static programming technique with dynamic inversion, which render a closed form solution of the necessary guidance command update. The closed form nature of the proposed optimal guidance scheme suppressed the computational difficulties, and facilitate realtime solution. The guidance law is successfully verified in a solid motor propelled long range flight vehicle, for which developing an effective guidance law is more difficult as compared to a liquid engine propelled vehicle, mainly because of the absence of thrust cutoff facility. The scheme guides the vehicle appropriately so that it completes the mission within a tight error bound assuming that the starting point of the second stage to be a deterministic point beyond the atmosphere. The simulation results demonstrate its ability to intercept the target, even with an uncertainty of greater than 10% in the burnout time

Reducing Buffer Requirements in Core Routers using Dynamic Buffering

Earlier studies have exploited statistical multiplexing of flows in the core of the Internet to reduce the buffer requirement in routers. Reducing the memory requirement of routers is important as it enables an improvement in performance and at the same time a decrease in the cost. In this paper, we observe that the links in the core of the Internet are typically over-provisioned and this can be exploited to reduce the buffering requirement in routers. The small on-chip memory of a network processor (NP) can be effectively used to buffer packets during most regimes of traffic. We propose a dynamic buffering strategy which buffers packets in the receive and transmit buffers of a NP when the memory requirement is low. When the buffer requirement increases due to bursts in the traffic, memory is allocated to packets in the off-chip DRAM. This scheme effectively mitigates the DRAM access bottleneck, as only a part of the traffic is stored in the DRAM. We build a Petri net model and evaluate the proposed scheme with core Internet like traffic. At 77% link utilization, the dynamic buffering scheme has a drop rate of just 0.65%, whereas the traditional DRAM buffering has 4.64% packet drop rate. Even with a high link utilization of 90%, which rarely happens in the core, our dynamic buffering results in a packet drop rate of only 2.17%, while supporting a throughput of 7.39 Gbps. We study the proposed scheme under different conditions to understand the provisioning of processing threads and to determine the queue length at which packets must be buffered in the DRAM. We show that the proposed dynamic buffering strategy drastically reduces the buffering requirement while still maintaining low packet drop rates.

Dynamic contact angle beating from drops impacting onto solid surfaces exhibiting anisotropic wetting

This paper reports an experimental investigation of low Weber number water drops impacting onto solid surfaces exhibiting anisotropic wetting. The wetting anisotropy is created by patterning the solid surfaces with unidirectional parallel grooves. Temporal measurements of impacting drop parameters such as drop base contact diameter, apparent contact angle of drop, and drop height at the center are obtained from high-speed video recordings of drop impacts. The study shows that the impact of low Weber number water drops on the grooved surface exhibits beating phenomenon in the temporal variations of the dynamic contact angle anisotropy and drop height at the center of the impacting drop. It is observed that the beating phenomenon of impacting drop parameters is caused by the frequency difference between the dynamic contact angle oscillations of impacting drop liquid oriented perpendicular and parallel to the direction of grooves on the grooved surface. The primary trigger for the phenomenon is the existence of non-axisymmetric drop flow on the grooved surface featuring pinned and free motions of drop liquid in the directions perpendicular and parallel to the grooves, respectively. The beat frequency is almost independent of the impact drop Weber number. Further experimental measurements with solid surfaces of different groove textures show that the grooved surface with larger wetting anisotropy may be expected to show a dominant beating phenomenon. The phenomenon is gradually damped out with time and is fully unrecognizable at higher drop impact Weber numbers. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A New Family of Soft Transition Converters: Design Example and Dynamic Model

The soft switching converters evolved through the resonant load, resonant switch, resonant transition and active clamp converters to eliminate switching losses in power converters. This paper briefly presents the operating principle of the new family of soft transition converters; the methodology of design of these converters is presented through an example. In the proposed family of converters, the switching transitions of both the main switch and auxiliary switch are lossless.When these converters are analysed in terms of the pole current and throw voltage, the defining equations of all converters belonging to this family become identical.Such a description allows one to define simple circuit oriented model for these converters. These circuit models help in evaluating the steady state and dynamic model of these converters. The standard dynamic performance functions of the converters are readily obtainable from this model. This paper presents these dynamic models and verifies the same through measurements on a prototype converter.

Compiler-Directed Dynamic Voltage Scaling using Program Phases

Energy consumption has become a major constraint in providing increased functionality for devices with small form factors. Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling has been identified as an effective approach for reducing the energy consumption of embedded systems. Earlier works on dynamic voltage scaling focused mainly on performing voltage scaling when the CPU is waiting for memory subsystem or concentrated chiefly on loop nests and/or subroutine calls having sufficient number of dynamic instructions. This paper concentrates on coarser program regions and for the first time uses program phase behavior for performing dynamic voltage scaling. Program phases are annotated at compile time with mode switch instructions. Further, we relate the Dynamic Voltage Scaling Problem to the Multiple Choice Knapsack Problem, and use well known heuristics to solve it efficiently. Also, we develop a simple integer linear program formulation for this problem. Experimental evaluation on a set of media applications reveal that our heuristic method obtains a 38% reduction in energy consumption on an average, with a performance degradation of 1% and upto 45% reduction in energy with a performance degradation of 5%. Further, the energy consumed by the heuristic solution is within 1% of the optimal solution obtained from the ILP approach.

A new family of soft transition converters: Design and dynamic model

The soft switching converters evolved through the resonant load, resonant switch, resonant transition and active clamp converters to eliminate switching losses in power converters. This paper briefly presents the operating principle of the new family of soft transition converters; the methodology of design of these converters is presented through an example. In the proposed family of converters, the switching transitions of both the main switch and auxiliary switch are lossless. When these converters are analysed in terms of the pole current and throw voltage, the defining equations of all converters belonging to this family become identical.Such a description allows one to define simple circuit oriented model for these converters. These circuit models help in evaluating the steady state and dynamic model of these converters. The standard dynamic performance functions of the converters are readily obtainable from this model. This paper presents these dynamic models and verifies the same through measurements on a prototype converter.

Command Tracking in High Performance Aircrafts: A New Dynamic Inversion Design

This paper proposes a new straight forward technique based on dynamic inversion, which is applied for tracking the pilot commands in high performance aircrafts.Pilot commands assumed in longitudinal mode are normal acceleration and total velocity(while roll angle and lateral acceleration are maintained at zero). In lateral mode, roll rate and total velocity are used as pilot commands (while climb rate and lateral acceleration are maintained at zero). Ensuring zero lateral acceleration leads to a better turn co-ordination. A six degree-of-freedom model of F-16 aircraft is used for both control design as well as simulation studies. Promising results are obtained which are found to be superior as compared to an existing approach (which is also based on dynamic inversion). The new approach has two potential benefits, namely reduced oscillatory response and reduced control magnitude. Another advantage of this approach is that it leads to a significant reduction of tuning parameters in the control design process.

Active Vibration Suppression of One-dimensional Nonlinear Structures Using Optimal Dynamic Inversion

A flexible robot arm can be modeled as an Euler-Bernoulli beam which are infinite degrees of freedom (DOF) system. Proper control is needed to track the desired motion of a robotic arm. The infinite number of DOF of beams are reduced to finite number for controller implementation, which brings in error (due to their distributed nature). Therefore, to represent reality better distributed parameter systems (DPS) should be controlled using the systems partial differential equation (PDE) directly. In this paper, we propose to use a recently developed optimal dynamic inversion technique to design a controller to suppress nonlinear vibration of a beam. The method used in this paper determines control forces directly from the PDE model of the system. The formulation has better practical significance, because it leads to a closed form solution of the controller (hence avoids computational issues).

Experimental evidence for interplay of dynamic heterogeneity and finite-size effect in glassy polymers

Despite two decades of extensive research, direct experimental evidence of a dynamical length scale determining the glass transition of confined polymers has yet to emerge. Using a recently established experimental technique of interface micro-rheology we provide evidence of finite-size effect truncating the growth of a quantity proportional to a dynamical length scale in confined glassy polymers, on cooling towards the glass transition temperature. We show how the interplay of variation of polymer film thickness and this temperature-dependent growing dynamical length scale determines the glass transition temperature, which in our case of 2-3nm thick films, is reduced significantly as compared to their bulk values.

An algorithm for dynamic optimal bandwidth allocation in communication networks

We study the problem of optimal bandwidth allocation in communication networks. We consider a queueing model with two queues to which traffic from different competing flows arrive. The queue length at the buffers is observed every T instants of time, on the basis of which a decision on the amount of bandwidth to be allocated to each buffer for the next T instants is made. We consider a class of closed-loop feedback policies for the system and use a twotimescale simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation(SPSA) algorithm to find an optimal policy within the prescribed class. We study the performance of the proposed algorithm on a numerical setting. Our algorithm is found to exhibit good performance.