Project Anubis: Cold Gas Attitude Control System
Faculty Mentor Name
Scott Post, Stephen Bruder
Format Preference
Poster
Abstract
Project Anubis’ main objective is to design, fabricate, and fly a cold gas thruster attitude control vehicle in a stable hover for a short duration. This project will serve as a testbed to develop an active attitude control system for the Mountain Spirt Program. The project is a cost-effective approach in building a drone-like vehicle with two contra-rotating propellers for altitude control and using eight cold gas thrusters for pitch and roll attitude control. This project will utilize Dead Band control theory. The control algorithm will be programmed in MATLAB Simulink and compiled to a Raspberry Pi that will send commands to our thrusters and receive orientation data. Project Anubis has been broken down into four different phases of testing. For the first phase, the goal is to gain an understanding of the thrust characteristics from the thruster. The next phase will be an initial test of the attitude control software in one degree of freedom of motion. Following that will be tested on two degrees of motion. Our final phase will be our flight test to achieve a stable hover flight. For this URI application, the expected outcome is to finish our first two phases of testing, I.e., the thruster characteristics and testing the attitude control system on one degree of freedom. As a project under the Rocket Development lab (RDL), this project will help the students put attitude control theory into practice and become experts within the organization for other future projects.
Project Anubis: Cold Gas Attitude Control System
Project Anubis’ main objective is to design, fabricate, and fly a cold gas thruster attitude control vehicle in a stable hover for a short duration. This project will serve as a testbed to develop an active attitude control system for the Mountain Spirt Program. The project is a cost-effective approach in building a drone-like vehicle with two contra-rotating propellers for altitude control and using eight cold gas thrusters for pitch and roll attitude control. This project will utilize Dead Band control theory. The control algorithm will be programmed in MATLAB Simulink and compiled to a Raspberry Pi that will send commands to our thrusters and receive orientation data. Project Anubis has been broken down into four different phases of testing. For the first phase, the goal is to gain an understanding of the thrust characteristics from the thruster. The next phase will be an initial test of the attitude control software in one degree of freedom of motion. Following that will be tested on two degrees of motion. Our final phase will be our flight test to achieve a stable hover flight. For this URI application, the expected outcome is to finish our first two phases of testing, I.e., the thruster characteristics and testing the attitude control system on one degree of freedom. As a project under the Rocket Development lab (RDL), this project will help the students put attitude control theory into practice and become experts within the organization for other future projects.