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MACCCS

The Michigan/AFRL Collaborative Center in Control Science (MACCCS, or MAX) is a collaboration between the University of Michigan, the Air Force Research Lab (Wright Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH), and MIT. Current hypersonic control and modeling research efforts at MIT are being conducted under the direction of Dr. Annaswamy. MIT will focus on exploring adaptive technologies for flight control of highly uncertain air breathing hypersonic vehicles performing complex maneuvers using a 6-DOF dynamic model. The Cooperative Control of Unmanned Air Vehicles (C2UAV) is also being conducted in the ARES Lab at MIT under the direction of Prof. Frazzoli.

Hypersonics

Control of Hypersonic vehicles is an extremely challenging task due to the largely varying operating conditions taking place during flight envelope. Due to the significant changes that occur in the aerodynamics, propulsion, and environmental conditions, and due to the fact that both physics-based models and data-driven models are either inaccurate or too complex, any feedback controller that is introduced in the vehicle has to be suitably advanced. The sophistication in this controller has to be two-fold: first, it has to accommodate the large changes that occur in the vehicle dynamics by incorporating self-adaptive components that have the ability to make on-line changes based on the newly available system measurements. Second, it should possess the ability to ascertain the dynamics that exists at a given operating point and provide a robust compensatory action that ensures safe realization of desired Figures of Merit.