Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-17-2024
Abstract
Flight-by-feel (FBF) is an approach to flight control that uses dispersed sensors on the wings of aircraft to detect flight state. While biological FBF systems, such as the wings of insects, often contain hundreds of strain and flow sensors, artificial systems are highly constrained by size, weight, and power (SWaP) considerations, especially for small aircraft. An optimization approach is needed to determine how many sensors are required and where they should be placed on the wing. Airflow fields can be highly nonlinear, and many local minima exist for sensor placement, meaning conventional optimization techniques are unreliable for this application. The Sparse Sensor Placement Optimization for Prediction (SSPOP) algorithm extracts information from a dense array of flow data using singular value decomposition and linear discriminant analysis, thereby identifying the most information-rich sparse subset of sensor locations. In this research, the SSPOP algorithm is evaluated for the placement of artificial hair sensors on a 3D delta wing model with a 45° sweep angle and a blunt leading edge. The sensor placement solution, or design point (DP), is shown to rank within the top one percent of all possible solutions by root mean square error in angle of attack prediction. This research is the first to evaluate SSPOP on a 3D model and the first to include variable length hairs for variable velocity sensitivity. A comparison of SSPOP against conventional greedy search and gradient-based optimization shows that SSPOP DP ranks nearest to optimal in over 90 percent of models and is far more robust to model variation. The successful application of SSPOP in complex 3D flows paves the way for experimental sensor placement optimization for artificial hair-cell airflow sensors and is a major step toward biomimetic flight-by-feel.
DOI
10.3390/biomimetics9100631
Source Publication
Biomimetrics (e-ISSN 2313-7673)
Recommended Citation
Hollenbeck, A. C., Beachy, A. J., Grandhi, R. V., & Pankonien, A. M. (2024). Data-Driven Sparse Sensor Placement Optimization on Wings for Flight-By-Feel: Bioinspired Approach and Application. Biomimetics, 9(10), 631. https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics9100631
Comments
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is published by MDPI, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Sourced from the published version of record cited below.
Funding notes: This research was supported in part by an appointment to the NRC Research Associateship Program at the Air Force Institute of Technology, administered by the Fellowships Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The contract number for the program is FA955024CB001. The APC was funded by the Air Force Institute of Technology.