Autonomous Mission Management Based Nonlinear Flight Control Design for a Class of Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, a nonlinear flight control law is designed for a hybrid unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to achieve the advanced flight performances with the autonomous mission management (AMM). The hybrid UAV is capable of hovering like quadrotors and maneuvering as fixed-wing aircraft. The main idea is to design the flight control laws in modules. Those modules are organized online by the autonomous mission management. Such online organization will improve the UAV autonomy. One of the challenges is to execute the transition flight between the rotary-wing and fixed-wing modes. The resulting closed-loop system with the designed flight control law is verified in simulation and the simulation results demonstrate that the resulting closed-loop system can successfully complete the designated flight missions including the transition flight between the rotary-wing and fixed-wing modes.

Lean Maturity Assessment in ETO Scenario

The obligatory path towards a lean manufacturing organization requires assessment and monitoring. However, a lean assessment framework is not yet available for the engineer to order (ETO) scenario. This work explored ten lean ETO maturity principles—identified from the literature—that take insight from three formally defined sets (Toyota Way, lean construction, and lean product development principles). A practical assessment model was proposed based on the evaluation of ten lean ETO objective criteria (four with mathematical formulation) and was validated on a real industrial case. A problem-solving tool, including a new lean tool, called the Problem Focus Matrix (PFM), was also presented; this tool was aimed toward development of an integrated framework that would include the organization mission, management, and continuous improvement.