Advanced Control of Endurance Aircraft Configured for Agile Hover Operations

Aircraft with very long endurance and range, but with the ability to perform hover and stare, ship-board recovery, and wind/gust rejection must have special control and dynamics properties that are different than any currently fielded aircraft. Aurora Flight Science will develop Precision Hover Agility (PHA) flight control design methods, and apply them to various configurations developed specifically to meet next-generation Navy needs. Aurora"s vehicle designs and methods take into account the need to provide large disturbance-rejection forces and moments, to detect both vehicle and ship dynamics in new ways, and to track in a predictive manner. Aurora will develop accurate models for a range of aircraft concepts, and test these concepts using advanced flight control methods in relevant gust and ship-deck tracking environments. Thus the Phase I effort will develop and demonstrate a flight control architecture for multi-flight-mode UAVs performing operations requiring precision hover agility. Development will be sufficient to enable Phase II prototype testing, whose set-up will begin during the Phase I option.