The field of flight dynamics and control deals with the motion of flight vehicles in the atmosphere and in space, as well as dynamics, control, and planning issues related to flight and space applications. The Department has a long history of excellence in the areas of flight dynamics and control systems. It was one of the first engineering departments in the nation to offer courses in automatic control, flight dynamics, and simulation. The flight dynamics and control specialization has a strong aerospace emphasis as illustrated by current research on aircraft dynamics, flight planning, flight control, and autonomous flight; dynamics and control of attitude systems; astrodynamics; guidance, navigation, and associated flight systems; flexible aerospace vehicles; and acoustics and flow control. There is a strong multidisciplinary systems orientation that emphasizes linear and nonlinear systems, optimization, feedback control, optimal planning and decision-making, stochastic processes and estimation, and computational and software aspects of flight systems. This specialization covers theory, experiments, and implementation issues, as well as the study of specific cutting edge aerospace vehicles.

Faculty
Ella M. Atkins
Dennis S. Bernstein
Anouck Girard
Pierre T. Kabamba
N. Harris McClamroch

FlyingFish: A Seaplane UAV/Ocean Buoy for Survellance & Tracking.

Autonomous Aerospace (A2) Systems Lab Testbeds for Surveillance, Planning, and Collaboration Research.

TableSat: 1-DOF Platform for Robust Flight Software Research and Education.

Shaker table facility in the Noise, Vibration and Motion Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

Six Degree-of-Freedom Active Isolation Stage in the Noise, Vibration, and Motion Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan.

ARC Laboratory Ground Robots
Experimental hardware: Unmanned Air Vehicles. We operate two Applied Research Associates Nighthawk Unmanned Air Vehicles for testing of collaborative control strategies for unmanned air vehicles.
ARC Laboratory Nighthawk Unmanned Air Vehicle
Experimental hardware: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. We jointly operate two Iver-2 Autonomous Underwater Vehicles with the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Program at the University of Michigan, for testing of collaborative control strategies for unmanned vehicles. This platform is useful for testing hardware and software schemes.
Iver-2 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle.
In addition, we cooperate with the Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory at the University of Porto, Portugal. The Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory (USTL) from Porto University was founded in 1997 to promote research, development, deployment, and operation of advanced systems and technologies in oceanographic and environment field studies. USTL has designed and operates Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) for the inspection of underwater structures, low cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) for coastal oceanography, and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV).

An optimal orbit and attitude maneuver for a dumbbell spacecraft in a central body gravitational field.

Triaxial Attitude Control Testbed for attitude control experiments.