Flight-Critical Systems

SSCI has strong expertise in flight critical system design and evaluation. Our research areas include: 

• Fault-tolerant fligth control system design combining fast on-line Failure Detection and Identification (FDI) with effective adaptive reconfigurable control for compensation of a large class of sensor and actuator faults and failures, and control effector and wing damage. 
• Integrated Vehicle Health Management combining FDIR with diagnostics of non-critical faults and failures, and prognostics to calculate the Useful Life Remaining (ULR) of component and subsystems.
• Loss-of-control prevention and recovery based on the calculation and tracking of dynamic trim trajectories that can assure aircraft stability despite the presence of severe failures and multiple control input saturations. 
• Verification and Validation of flight-critical systems using reachable set analysis and Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI).
• Performance evaluation through high-fidelity simulations of aircraft, rotorcraft and spacecraft, piloted simulations, and flight tests.