GURUGANESH R

Guruganesh has been working in the area of design, developemnt, verification and testing of flight control laws for various classes of aircraft ranging from Combat aerial vehicles, both manned and unmanned to unmanned Mini/Micro Aerial vehicles for civilian and strategic applications. He has also worked in the design, development and flight-testing of miniature autopilot technology solutions for Unmanned Micro Aerial Vehicles.

He has adopted model based design technique in the functionality design of autopilot Navigation, Guidance and control algorithms for CSIR-NAL developed Indigenous autopilot for MAVs.  This approach enables seamless integration of the autopilot software from simulation to onboard implementation. The developed algorithms were validated in model in the loop and Processor in the loop simulation before integrating the autopilot board with the real time simulation set up.

He was also involved in the design and development of a PC based Hardware in Loop Simulation (HILS) set up for the verification of the onboard autopilot software and hardware functionalities in the simulation environment. The set-up is built using real time target machine, with a real time, operating system to meet the timing constraints required for real time applications. Autopilot hardware and software functionalities has been verified extensively in the HILS set-up before carrying out the flight-testing experiments. The proposed HILS has good fidelity in terms of the sensor protocols of the autopilot board. He spearheaded more than 200 flight-testing experiments, where, the fully autonomous functionality of the indigenous autopilot (from Autotake off till autolanding) were successfully tested on several MAV airframes developed by CSIR-NAL.

His research focus is on “Design of Robust Flight Control Laws using sliding mode control approach – for Unmanned Micro Aerial Vehicles” to overcome the uncertainties and unmodeled nonlinearities these flying vehicles encounters in real-time. Robust stabilization of Micro Aerial Vehicles with unmodeled actuator nonlinearities like backlash and deadzone, real time reference trajectory tracking control problem for a Nonminimum phase MIMO MAV model and analysis of zerodynamcis stability characteristics of a nonlinear aircraft model during tracking are the challenging problems in field of flight control that are successfully analyzed and solved by him. He has also implemented the second order sliding mode control based autopilot control algorithm on the Pixhawk hardware and carried out extensive Hardware-in-the loop simulation using full-scale nonlinear 6DoF model of the aircraft. He has also done the validation of the offline results with the HILS results. He has published four research articles in international journals and seven articles in reputed international conferences. Extensive design analysis and simulation studies presented in his research papers will certainly kindle interest in researcher's to implement such technique on autopilot hardware module and carry out real time flight-testing.

Research Interest: Flight stability and control, control of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles, control of mini rotorcrafts, sliding mode observer and control, control of nonlinear dynamic systems and robust adaptive control.