Adaptive Flight Control Experiments using RAVEN

This paper discusses a new flight test facility at MIT known as the Real-time indoor Autonomous Vehicle test ENvironment (RAVEN) which enables the exploration of aggressive aerobatic flight with relatively low risk. A key feature of this work is that the control algorithms are often the limiting factor because the flight dynamics are highly nonlinear and not well known, and they can change with the flight mode and over time. This paper discusses the RAVEN facility and presents some initial experimental results using fixed wing UAVs. These results demonstrate some of the key advantages of using RAVEN; illustrate the types of performance limitations typically faced when executing aggressive aerobatic maneuvers; and motivate the current research on adaptive flight control.