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MEAM Seminar: “Fault-Tolerant Control on VTOL Aircraft”
April 30, 2019 at 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
High-speed rotorcraft such as coaxial compound helicopters have a significant degree of control redundancy that can be exploited to minimize power requirement, noise, and vibration, in various flight conditions. This lecture focuses on a new idea – how control redundancy can be leveraged to compensate for control actuation failure. Both adaptive as well as robust strategies are examined, and operation post-failure is demonstrated via simulation. Multi-copters with greater than four rotors (hexacopters, octocopters, etc.), also offer control redundancy, allowing for safe operation post-failure by using the remaining (uncompromised) rotors. The lecture will examine the kind of failures that can be compensated on classical hexacopters and octocopters, along with the changes in rotor operational speed requirements, and the associated physics, post-failure.
Farhan Gandhi
Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr Chair in Engineering, Department of Mechanical Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Farhan Gandhi is the Rosalind and John J. Redfern Jr. ’33 Endowed Chair in Aerospace Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in the US. He is also RPI’s Aerospace Program Director, and Director of RPI’s Center for Mobility with Vertical Lift (MOVE). His research interest and activities cover the areas of rotorcraft aeromechanics, advanced rotary-wing configurations, multi-rotor aircraft, as well as smart/adaptive structures. Dr. Gandhi has been a visionary on reconfiguration in vertical lift platforms and high-speed rotorcraft and is credited with some of the most significant pioneering work in these areas with support from federal and state agencies as well as industry. He is a Technical Fellow of the American Helicopter Society, winner of the 1998 AHS Francios Xavier Bagnoud Award and the 2007 Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Award (for morphing rotors). He is a past Chair of the AHS Dynamics and Aircraft Design Technical Committees, and the AHS Education Committee. His research group at RPI comprises of eleven PhD students, two post-doctoral research scholars, and a number of undergrad and MS students. Dr. Gandhi is author of over 275 articles appearing in archival journals and technical conference proceedings.