Michigan/AFRL Collaborative Center in Control Science (MACCCS)

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and an Aero-led team have established the Michigan/AFRL Collaborative Center in Control Science (MACCCS). Established in the summer of 2007, with four-year funding, the MACCCS' mission is to develop, sustain and amplify an internationally recognized center of excellence in control science research and education through strategic, robust interaction between the faculty and students and AFRL. In addition, Massachusetts Institute of Technology is also a MACCCS partner. The MACCCS' overall scope includes:

• Collaborative Control of Unmanned Air Vehicles
• Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles.

The MACCCS consists of the following Aerospace Engineering faculty: Carlos Cesnik, Jim Driscoll, and Anouck Girard, as well as a faculty from MIT.

The Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles concentration addresses the problem of coordinating the motion of a possibly large number of heterogeneous mobile agents, in order to provide persistent, real-time, human-driven tactical services, to operators in the field. Mobile agents will in general include autonomous or semi-autonomous fixed- and rotary wing aircraft, ground vehicles, and human-controlled units, operating over a geographically extended region of interest. Services of interest may include, for example, Urban Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), cooperative attack, cooperative sensing, and communication relays. The objective of the cooperative control effort will be to ensure the highest possible aggregate Quality of Service. The work will focus on two main issues:

• Supervision and control of cooperative heterogeneous systems, in the perspective of mixed-initiative operations, including information de-confliction and combination, multi-scale representations, and interconnected decision and control systems to maximize situation awareness
• Dynamic, sequential, combinatorial and/or stochastic mission planning, including the development of a systematic approach to the design and analysis of provably efficient, scalable, robust, and adaptive algorithms for cooperative control of large-scale heterogeneous networks of mobile agents. The work will be performed in close collaboration with researchers at AFRL.

The Air-Breathing Hypersonic Vehicles (ABHV) concentration is motivated by the fact that designing effective controllers for air-breathing hypersonic vehicles requires reliable characterization of these vehicles' unique dynamics. These come from the strong interactions between the aerodynamics, elastic airframe and control effector deformations, heat transfer, and propulsion system (itself tightly integrated into the lifting body), making the characterization of the flight dynamics of such vehicles very challenging. The work will focus on two main issues:

• Development of simple low-order models that can characterize the main aeroservothermoelastic effects coupled with propulsion and can be used in a 6 DOF flight dynamics simulation of ABHV
• Determination on how to appropriately modify the vehicle configuration to improve its dynamic controllability without compromising vehicle performance. These will be preformed in close collaboration with researchers at AFRL who will provide primarily the control design and modeling expertise as part of the Collaborative Center.