• Journal of the Korean Society of Propulsion Engineers
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.79-91
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• 2008

The present article is intended to introduce the X-51A Scramjet Engine Demonstrator-Wave Rider (SED-WR) program and its core technologies to the korean propulsion community. The X-51A program is lead by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Most of the contents is taken from the paper by Hank et al.[1] with the supplemental materials from additional references. X-51A is a hypersonic experimental vehicle for the flight test of the hydrocarbon fuel-cooled scramjet engine developed by the AFRL HyTech program. The scramjet engine and the hypersonic flight technologies may enter the era of practical use by the completion of the ground tests in 2008 followed by the flight tests scheduled in 2009.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.912-918
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• 2016

This paper presents various strategies for humanoid vehicle driving and egress tasks. For driving, a tele-operating system that controls a robot based on a human operator's commands is built. In addition, an autonomous assistant module is developed for the operator. Normal position control can result in severe damage to robots when they egress from vehicles. To prevent this problem, another approach that mixes various joint control techniques is adopted in this study. Additionally, a footplate is newly designed and attached to the vehicle floor for the ground landing phase of the egress task. The attached plate enables the robot to step down onto the ground in a safe manner. For stable locomotion, a balance controller is designed for the humanoid. For the design of the controller, the robot is modeled using an inverted pendulum that consists of a spring and a damper. Then, a state feedback controller (with pole placement and a state observer) is built based on the simplified model. Many approaches that are presented in this paper were successfully applied to a full-sized humanoid, DRC-HUBO+, in the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, which were held in the United States in 2015.