An integrated fuzzy guidance (IFG) law for a surface to air homing missile is introduced. The introduced approach is a modification of the well-known proportional navigation guidance (PNG) law. The IFG law enables the missile to approach a high maneuvering target while trying to minimize control effort as well as miss-distance in a two-stage flight. In the first stage, while the missile is far ...

Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle platform operating in air and underwater with seamless transition between both mediums. These unique capabilities combined with the hovering, high maneuverab...

This paper presents recent advances in the project: development of a convertible unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This aircraft is able to change its flight configuration from hover to level flight and vice versa by means of a transition maneuver, while maintaining the aircraft in flight. For this purpose a nonlinear control strategy based on Lyapunov design is given. Numerical results are presen...

An idealized energy fluctuation model of a bird's body undergoing horizontal flapping flight is developed, focusing on the biomechanical power discernible to a body-mounted accelerometer. Expressions for flight body power constructed from root mean square dynamic body accelerations and wingstroke frequency are derived from first principles and presented in dimensionally appropriate units. As wi...

The origin of avian flight is a classic macroevolutionary transition with research spanning over a century. Two competing models explaining this locomotory transition have been discussed for decades: ground up versus trees down. Although it is impossible to directly test either of these theories, it is possible to test one of the requirements for the trees-down model, that of an arboreal paravi...

A new large-area detector system was constructed at the University of Chicago for direct measurements of heavy cosmic ray nuclei (oxygen to iron) up to about 10 TeV/nucleon. TRACER (”Transition Radiation Array for Cosmic Energetic Radiation”) uses plastic scintillators to measure charge and a proportional tube array to measure energy via specific ionization and transition radiation. While TRACE...

The paper presents new results on the verification and in–flight validation of an L1 adaptive flight control system, and proposes a general methodology for verification and validation of adaptive flight control algorithms. The proposed framework is based on Rohrs’ counterexample, a benchmark problem presented in the early 80s to show the limitations of adaptive controllers developed at that tim...

Beginning in the mid-1980s, the phenomenon of capital flight from developing countries received considerable attention in the economics literature. Capital flight destroys the domestic macroeconomic environment and decreases transparency and accountability. It restricts financial resources when a country is looking for economic growth and development. The purpose of this article is to measure t...

In this paper a fast and effective algorithm named equal feature variance sum (EFVS) framesynchronous searching is presented for state decoding. EFVS controls the state transition by using only the feature variance of the speech, instead of by using the state dwell distribution. The basic hypothesis of this new algorithm is the equality of feature variance sum in each state of the speech. Given...

Small fixed-wing UAS that are able to hover combine the station keeping abilities of a rotary wing platform and the extended range of conventional aircraft. Current autopilots for these vehicles rely on inertial measurements plus airspeed to transition from forward flight to hover, accumulating appreciable position error during the transition. Once in hover, a combination of inertial and GPS da...