Traditional shaking-table testing has been limited by the effectiveness of conventional fixed-gain algorithms used in their control. These algorithms are normally based on linear models of the shaking table and specimen, whose parameters are assumed to be fixed for the duration of the test. Although the influence of the specimen in the overall system dynamics can be partly removed by fine-tuning the linear controller, this process cannot deal with nonlinear effects and is limited in scope by the expertise of the operator.The minimal control synthesis (MCS) algorithm is a form of adaptive control, which was originally and successfully employed to cope with the nonlinear problems in the field of robotics. The MCS algorithm can tune the controller in real-time without any parametric knowledge of the system to be controlled. This paper describes how MCS has been incorporated within both analog and digital controllers for shaking tables and shows some of the results achieved on tables at the University of Bristol and at Athens Technical University. In both cases, the introduction of adaptive control has noticeably improved the performance of the shaking table, correcting errors by more than 5 dB in some experiments.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The Ground Segment for Mission Operations is a complex System of Systems, including a significant variety of complex elements, often generic and reused across missions, following adaptation to meet mission or family of missions specific requirements and configuration. For such Systems of Systems, the availability of a reference environment where individual ground segment components can be deployed and tested throughout their lifecycle, both at subsystem level and in integrated test chains up to a complete End-to-End Ground Segment, is critical. Also the representativeness of such an environment is critical, in particular the representativeness of the test scenarios with respect to the end-user use cases. At the European Space Operations Centre, the End-to-End Ground Segment Reference Facility has been established as the one-stop environment where the System level Integration and Testing of the Mission Operations Infrastructure takes place. This paper provides an insight into the technical aspects of the End-to-End Ground Segment Reference Facility, the latest achievements, an overview of the remaining challenges and the outlook of its intended evolution.