Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Control: a Practical Approach to Achieve Unprecedented Structural Vibration Control Performance, Robustness, and Reliability

Adaptive spatio-temporal filtering methods are proposed which are inherently suitable to utilizing many sensors and actuators to achieve superior control and monitoring of structures for vibration and shape control and damage detection. When utilizing large numbers of sensors and actuators, failure detection and failure recovery become important issues. The adaptive spatio-temporal filtering methods can detect and accommodate sensor and actuator failures, reconfiguring spatial filter coefficients, on-line, to best utilize the remaining sensors and actuators to maintain control performance. Fast and accurate estimation of the dynamic characteristics (pole values) of time varying structures is facilitated by the spatil ,-temporal filters reducing complex multi-mode response to sets of simple single-degree-of-freedom responses. This research and development will result in lower operating costs and improved performance of a variety of military and commercial applications by achieving lower vibration levels, improved fatigue life, increased comfort and accuracy. Applications include aircraft vibration, noise, and flutter reduction, improved weapons and sensing platform stability for increased accuracy.