Consulting - Industry Expertise

Aerospace and Defense

Our consultants are uniquely qualified to benefit clients in this industry. They have years of practical experience and proven success in aerospace and defense projects, and they are equally well equipped to design a complete control system or to analyze an existing design.

Our clients are international industry leaders such as Boeing, EADS, SNECMA, DERA, and BAE Systems. We pride ourselves on the fact that much of our work is repeat business.

Our services include developing control and guidance systems for aerospace vehicles, vehicle model development, trade-off studies, and system identification. The MathWorks Consultants recently developed and flight-tested an experimental flight control law (FCL) for the DERA VAAC Harrier Jump Jet. The FCL used multivariable control (MVC) to reduce cross-axis coupling, thereby improving performance and reducing design effort.

Recent projects include:

• Missile Autopilot and Guidance System Design
• Missile autopilot design using classical, H-infinity, LPV, and NDI methods
• Guidance system design using classical and H-infinity methods
• Trajectory optimization and trade-off studies and equivalent trajectory-following guidance laws

Helicopter Stability Augmentation and Assisted Landing

• Design and testing of helicopter stability augmentation systems
• Handling quality assessment in a piloted simulation
• Design of controllers and interfaces for automatic and assisted landings onto moving platforms

Stability Analysis for Certification

• Application of multivariable stability margins and derivation of bounds from flight data

Motion Platform/Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing

• Modeling and control of a motion platform
• Validation of the control system in real time on a model of the platform

Land Vehicles and Weapons

• Six-degrees-of-freedom modeling of vehicles and their drivetrains
• Modeling weapons, power systems, and projectiles

Submarines and RPVs

• Modeling and control of various concept vehicles
• Application of multivariable control to realize de-coupled depth and pitch