the FSC group focuses on the following research theme: to discover innovative control solutions for aviation systems (including unmanned aerial systems) to improve flight performance, and to develop transformative control technologies for aviation applications to achieve autonomy.
in terms of innovative flight control solutions, our research interests include but not limited to:
- coordinated flight control – multiple aircraft fly in formation or in coordination to achieve sophisticated tasks through collection and collaboration, it is enabled by network-oriented flight control techniques that regulate both individual aircraft and the group of aircraft dynamic behaviour, it also aims at scalability to expand coordination and cooperation;
- resilient flight control – keep safe flight in mind, to maintain flight performance in the presence of system uncertainty or environmental disturbance [robust control], to maintain stable flight in the presence of failures [fault-tolerant control], but we shall go beyond to make flight more independent to resist uncertainty, disturbance, or failure by seeking solutions to increase flight system’s adaptable capability, reconfigurable capacity, in other words, self-organized and resilient;
- intelligent flight control – a well-designed flight control is a highly integrated component that interacts with the rest of the flight systems, the full function is achieved or optimized by information collection, processing, decision-making and execution, it is expected that flight control tends to be integrated with increased smartness by recent advancement in the machine learning (or AI in a more general term) field.
in terms of transformative flight control technologies, our development interests include but also not limited to:
- swarming aerial robotics applications – inspired by our formation flight and cooperative control research, we are interested in applications using swarming aerial robots, as we believe the coordination of robots in large scale will broaden our horizons in aviation, to enable novel features, to increase mission scope, and to improve overall flight performance;
- autonomous aerial robotics applications – our research on flight control also leads us to the technical development for autonomous flight applications, where we believe the reliable autonomy is the key to the success of these applications, to make autonomous flight operation satisfying and trustworthy.
may the (control) force be with you (your flight)
