Isentropic Flight Guidance System for Unmanned Air Vehicles

When interpreting chemical changes from measurements made on moving platforms it is important to remove signatures due to the motion of the air. This has proved difficult on existing manned aircraft such as the ER-2, necessitating post-processing of the data prior to interpretation. Digital flight control systems offer the possibility to receive signals from onboard scientific payload instruments and use them to fly a trajectory of specific scientific interest such as constant potential temperature, maximum cloud particle density, or maximum chemical species gradient. Unmanned aircraft are particularly attractive platforms for conducting these experiments since they are highly maneuverable, already set up to operate off computer-driven systems, and involve no risk to human life onboard. The innovation proposed herein is the first fully automatic flight control system that integrates data from scientific payloads with aircraft state variables to provide flight guidance commands based on specific scientific needs. During Phase I several control algorithms will be investigated and simulated. During Phase II one or more algorithms would be fully developed and demonstrated in flight aboard an unmanned aircraft.