An Instrumentation System Applied To Formation Flight

Kiriti RambhatlaThayalan SelvamKelvin Ratnayake

Viveknanthan Suganthan

References • 1) I.D Hummel, “The use of aircraft wakes to achieve

power reductions in formation flight”, presented at the advisory group of Aerospace Research & Development.

• 2)D.F Chichka and JL Speyer, “Solar-powered, formation-enhanced aerial vehicle systems for sustained endurance”,in Proc.Amer.Contr.Conf.

• 3) R.J Ray , B.R. Cobleigh, M.J. Vachon,and C.J St, Flight test techniques used to evaluate performance benefits during formation flight, NASA Dryden research centre.

• 4)www.nasa.gov• 5)www.site.uottawa.ca/~misbah/elg4392/index.html

What Is Formation Flight

Applications Of Formation Flights

Ground Based Systems

• Previously the information from the formation flight would reach ground based instruments and then to the flights back again .

• This lead to a number of accidents and failures in formations flights , hence NASA came up with an Instrumentation System called the Formation Flight Instrumentation System (FFIS).

• FFIS makes use of GPS , Extended Kalman filter and an interface .

BLOCK DIAGRAM FFIS

Extended KALMAN FILTER• The Kalman Filter is a recursive filter which

estimates the state of a dynamic system from a series of incomplete and noisy measurements.

• In this project an extended KALMAN filter is used along with GPS( FFIS) to eliminate the need for ground based systems information flight.

• We used MATLAB to simulate the results for the filter to estimate position, velocity and attitude of the next aircraft.

EXTENDED KALMAN FILTER EQUATIONS

Simulation Results

SIMULATIONS WITHOUT FILTER

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 100

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5True angle

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-2

-1.5

-1

-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2Compass Measurement

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-2

-1.5

-1

-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2Tangential Accelerometer Measurement

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

/Sec

2

SIMULATIONS WITH KALMAN FILTER

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5Estimation of Angular position

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

3.5 Estimation of Angular Velocity

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

/sec

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10-2

-1.5

-1

-0.5

0

0.5

1

1.5

2Estimation of Angular Acceleration

Time in Seconds

Rad

ians

/sec

2

STATE SPACE EQUATION FOR AIRCRAFT

BODY CO ORDINATE FRAME FOR AN AIRCRAFT

ANGLES OF OPERATION

SIMULINK MODEL OF AIRCRAFT (NON LINEAR SYSTEM)

PLOTS

THANK YOU

• Questions