Open, Programmable, Affordable Distributed Propulsion Control System

The Agility Prime Air Vehicle requires a distributed propulsion control system.  New Eagle proposes a hierarchical control system using the Rugged UAS control components of Raptor™ Open Architecture system and Control Algorithms developed in partnership with Georgia Tech. The proposed hierarchical architecture allows for advanced flight control and diagnostics safety functions in flight management layer, a Master propulsion control that includes management of the generation, battery and thermal systems, and Slave controllers of individual electric motors. Rugged Raptor controller hardware is a good solution because current US Air Force and other DoD UAS/SUAS propulsion and power control systems are often unreliable and employ closed, proprietary architectures that lack scalability, leading to lengthy and costly modifications when changes are needed by the warfighter.   The problem is caused by application specific design, slow software development practices, and custom hardware. In addition, current UAS/SUAS control systems are often based on hobby hardware and software and tend not to have the ruggedness required in a military or commercially regulated environment. The solution is New Eagle’s commercially proven Raptor™ model-based development platform of software tools and rugged embedded hardware. Raptor allows an open-architecture control system to be built that can be reused for many applications.