You're invited to attend

AE Seminar

Designing Rotorcraft Flight Controllers to Meet Mission Requirements

featuring

Joseph F. Horn

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Aerospace Engineering
The Pennsylvania State University

Monday, October 7
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
College of Computing, Room 017
801 Atlantic Dr NW, Atlanta, GA 30332

About the Seminar: 
Automatic Flight Control Systems (AFCS) are essential to achieving the complex missions of modern rotorcraft. Flight control design for rotorcraft is challenging due to the difficult missions they are required to perform and the complexity of the vehicle dynamics. Defining effective design specifications and rigorous testing procedures are critical to the AFCS design process. This seminar will present two different rotorcraft flight control design studies that explore the achievable handling qualities and flight controller performance for difficult rotorcraft missions. In the first study, full envelope flight controllers are designed for two high speed rotorcraft configurations to meet desired handling qualities specifications. A piloted simulation test is used to investigate various control modes and response types, and the resulting handling qualities benefits are assessed for each configuration. The controller is modified to optimize maneuver performance and piloted simulation is used to verify the performance benefits. The second study investigates autonomous ship landing on a moving ship deck using small scale drone testing in the US Navy Maneuvering and Sea Keeping (MASK) basin. The study explores two autonomous trajectory planning algorithms: a imple decking tracking method and quadratic programming trajectory optimization with deck motion forecasting. Testing is conducted to evaluate the performance of the trajectory planners with variations in controller response bandwidth. Results show that intelligent trajectory planning with deck motion forecasting can achieve better landing performance with much lower response bandwidth.

About the Speaker: 

Joseph F. Horn joined the Penn State Aerospace Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor in 2000 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Professor in 2014. Prior to joining the Penn State faculty, he was a senior engineer at Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation. Dr. Horn received his doctoral degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where his thesis research resulted in a U.S. patent and a national award from the American Helicopter Society.

Horn’s research is in the areas of flight dynamics, simulation, control, handling qualities, and autonomy with emphasis on rotorcraft applications. His research has focused on the use of advanced dynamic modeling and control design methods to improve handling characteristics, performance, safety, reliability, and life-cycle costs of piloted and unmanned rotorcraft. Several of his projects have a multi-disciplinary component and involve collaboration with faculty working in the areas of fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, and acoustics.

Horn is a Deputy Director of the Penn State Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE). The VRLCOE undergoes competitive renewal every five years, and Horn contributed to the successful renewal proposals in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016, and 2021. He has been a principal investigator on several different research projects funded through the VLRCOE, the Vertical Lift Consortium (VLC), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), FAA, NASA, industrial sponsors, and others.

Horn has developed two advanced rotorcraft flight simulation facilities through donations from industry and three ONR DURIP grants (awarded in 2006, 2015, and 2016). These unique facilities provide high fidelity flight simulators that have supported several of Horn’s research programs. The simulator is regularly used for outreach and instructional activities. Since 2019, Professor Horn has been PI or Co-PI on 24 research awards, with Professor Horn’s funding share totaling approximately $5.5M. Some of the recent and ongoing research topics investigated by Horn’s group include:

• Development of modeling tools and control system design methods to reduce (or eliminate) pilot workload when landing rotorcraft on ships in high sea states and adverse weather conditions.
• Modeling and simulation, and active stabilization of external slung loads on rotorcraft,
  including single rotorcraft and multi-lift systems.
• Control allocation for performance optimization, load alleviation, and damage tolerant control on over-actuated rotorcraft.
• Modeling and simulation tools and abatement methods for reducing rotorcraft noise.
• Design, modeling and simulation, and control design for Distributed Electric Propulsion aircraft.
• Modeling of Pilot Adaptive Control Behavior
• Real-time free wake modeling for rotorcraft flight simulation

In 2017, Professor Horn received the AIAA de Florez Award for Flight Simulation, which cited his pioneering contributions to rotorcraft flight simulation research and education, including piloted shipboard landing, real-time simulation of coupled flight dynamics, ship airwake modeling, and acoustics. Dr. Horn was named Technical Fellow of the Vertical Flight Society in 2023 for 30 years of sustained excellence and leadership in research, teaching and service to the vertical flight community, specifically in the areas of flight controls, simulation, handling qualities and aeromechanics. 

Horn has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses related to dynamics, control, aeronautics, and design. He regularly teaches the senior-level courses in aircraft stability and control and aerospace control systems. He has developed two graduate level courses: Rotorcraft Stability and Control and Dynamics and Control of Aerospace Vehicles. Dr. Horn has also cotaught the helicopter section of the capstone aircraft design course. The class participates in the annual Vertical Flight Society Student Design Competition. Teams under Horn’s supervision placed 1st in 2010 and 2013, 2nd in 2011, 2012 and 2015, and 3rd in 2016 and 2018. Horn is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and an active member of the Vertical Flight Society (VFS, which prior to 2018 was known as the American Helicopter Society or AHS). Horn served on the VFS Handling Qualities technical committee from 2003 to 2020, serving as chair from 2009-2010. In 2011, he was the technical chair for the 68th Annual Forum of the American Helicopter Society, overseeing the largest technical conference in the rotorcraft industry. He served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Helicopter Society from 2010 to 2016 and as the Editor-in-Chief from 2016 to 2019. Dr. Horn is currently the VFS Deputy Technical Director for Aeromechanics overseeing four of the most active Technical Committees in VFS (Aerodynamics, Acoustics, Dynamics, and Handling Qualities).

Professor Horn served on the NATO Research Task Group AVT 296 on “Rotorcraft Flight Simulation Model Fidelity Improvement and Assessment” from 2017 to 2021. This group involved the top rotorcraft simulation experts from across several NATO countries to develop guidelines on best practices for assessing and improving the fidelity of rotorcraft simulators. Professor Horn has served on several departmental, college, and university level committees, the Engineering Faculty Council, and the University Faculty Senate. He chaired the Aerospace Engineering Department Head Search committee in 2016. He currently serves on the Department Promotion and Tenure Committee and Graduate Committees. Starting in July 2024, Dr. Horn became the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Aerospace Engineering.