Alexander Köthe, Alexander Behrens, Alexander Hamann, Phillip Nagel, Danny Nowka, Robert Luckner
DOI Number: N/A
Conference number: IFASD-2017-111
At TU Berlin’s department of Flight Mechanic, Flight Control and Aeroelasticity the concept of a Multi-Body High Altitude Pseudo Satellite aircraft is investigated for surveillance and communication tasks. This aircraft consists of several individual aircraft that are coupled in the mission altitude to a formation with a high aspect ratio. The aircraft was designed for a continuous one year mission in 20 km height based on the DARPA Vulture program specification. Based on a suitable flight dynamic model, the flight control laws for flight path control were designed and verified in closed-loop nonlinear simulation studies. A validation of the new control law approach for a Multi-Body aircraft is missing. In this paper, a small scaled Experimental Multi-Body aircraft is used to validate the control laws in flight test. Besides the flight dynamics and flight control law design, the paper describes the experimental setup in detail.