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The
IFC
GroupTeam:
Dr.
K. KrishnaKumar, Craig Pires, Don Soloway, Dr. Chuck Jorgensen,
Joe Totah, Ken Lindsay, Shane Agabon and Dr. John Bull.
What
it does:
The IFC adapts and reconfigures control responses
to accommodate structural changes in the aircraft. For example,
if the wing is damaged, IFC learns the dynamics of the "new"
airplane and adapts the control response to minimize the
impact on the pilot's ability to maneuver the damaged airplane.
This ability to rapidly adapt the flight controller to a
changed aircraft configuration allows the IFC to be used
to develop controllers for prototyped aircraft.
- From a 2-D image, a 3-D wireframe CAD image is created.
- The wireframe is given movable flight surfaces like wingflaps, canards, ailerons and stablizers.
- The model can be tested in a virtual wind tunnel.
- After these tests, a pilot can test-fly the aircraft in a virtual 3-D environment, because the Intelligent Flight Controller is able to model the behavior characteristics of this new aircraft.
The success of IFC developments paves the way for safer aircraft control systems, as well as improved aircraft control system design cycles from both a cost and time-to-certification perspective. IFC is helping to achieve the aeronautics industry rapid prototyping goal of 50% improvement in aircraft software development speed in five years. IFC provides a new approach to design visualization and rapid aircraft prototyping through neural control coupled with virtual reality testing and software evaluation. An entirely new rapid design testbed based on a virtual reality simulation recently demonstrated its usability by permitting a four-day development of a Mars Airplane concept starting with a two-dimensional drawing, and ending with a fully actuated flight simulation over texture mapped ground data from Mars' Valles Marineris.
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