Disturbance Rejection with Distributed Acceleration and Strain Sensing

A disturbance rejection method is proposed by means of force adaptive feedback from strain and acceleration measurements. This reactive response from force sensitive measurements is initiated before the disturbance propagates to lower order pose and velocity states, mitigating the effect of external forces and torques on the airframe. These measurements are provided through two sensing schemes, arrays of distributed accelerometers and body-fixed strain gauges. This computationally efficient method of distributed sensing allows low quality individual components to produce robust estimates of forces and torques. The response of each of these systems was characterized in response to induced force or acceleration stimuli. A roll perturbation was mitigated with feedback from the accelerometer measurements. Similarly, a heave perturbation was mitigated with feedback from the strain measurements