Aided Inertial Estimation of Wing Shape

Advanced large-wing-span aircraft result in more structural flexibility and the potential for instability or poor handling qualities. These shortcomings call stability augmentation systems that entail active control. Consequently, in-flight estimation of wing shape is beneficial control very flexible aircraft. This paper proposes a new methodology estimating states based on extended Kalman filtering by exploiting ideas employed aided inertial navigation systems. High-bandwidth-rate gyro angular velocities at different stations are integrated to provide short-term standalone solution, additional low-bandwidth aiding sensors then bound diverging errors. The proposed filter implementation does not require flight dynamics model aircraft, facilitates often tedious tuning process, allows accurate under large nonlinear deflections. To illustrate approach, technique verified means simulations using sighting devices as sensors, an observability study conducted. In contrast previous work literature stereo vision, sensor configuration provides fully observable state found only one camera multiple rate gyros update prediction phases, respectively.