Longitudinal parameter estimation from real flight data of unmanned cropped delta flat plate configuration

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to describe the longitudinal aerodynamic characterization of an unmanned cropped delta configuration from real flight data. In order to perform this task an unmanned configuration with cropped delta planform and rectangular cross-section has been designed, fabricated, instrumented and flight tested at flight laboratory in Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK), India.

Design/methodology/approach

As a part of flight test program a real flight database, through various maneuvers, have been generated for the designed unmanned configuration. A dedicated flight data acquisition system, capable of onboard logging and telemetry to ground station, has been used to record the flight data during these flight test experiments. In order to identify the systematic errors in the measurements, the generated flight data has been processed through data compatibility check.

Findings

It is observed from the flight path reconstruction that the obtained biases are negligible and the scale factors are almost close to unity. The linear aerodynamic model along with maximum likelihood and least-square methods have been used to perform the parameter estimation from the obtained compatible flight data. The lower values of Cramer-Rao bounds obtained for various parameters has shown significant confidence in the estimated parameters using maximum likelihood method. In order to validate the aerodynamic model used and to increase the confidence in the estimated parameters a proof-of-match exercise has been carried out.

Originality/value

The entire work presented is original and all the experiments have been carried out in Flight laboratory of IITK.

Citation

Saderla, S., R, D. and Ghosh, A.K. (2016), "Longitudinal parameter estimation from real flight data of unmanned cropped delta flat plate configuration", International Journal of Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 2-22. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJIUS-07-2015-0008