Flight Control Parameter Design for Mars Airplane Balloon Experiment-1 (MABE-1) Using Evolutionary Computation

Abstract

Airplanes are paid attention as a new platform for Mars exploration. A high-altitude flight test using balloon was conducted in June 2016 by Japanese working group for Mars exploration aircraft. This paper reports a method of control gain tuning for the flight test using evolutionary computation approach. This method can find optimal robust control gains efficiently and automatically. The combination of the control gains are evaluated by the simulations of a finite number of the dispersion conditions defined by the sensitivity analysis. A summary of a flight test, a control law, an optimization method, a flight simulation method, an evaluation function setting, and an optimization result are described.