Adaptive Modified RISE-based Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking with Actuator Uncertainty Compensation

This paper presents an adaptive robust nonlinear control method, which achieves reliable trajectory tracking control for a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle in the presence of gyroscopic effects, rotor dynamics, and external disturbances. Through novel mathematical manipulation in the error system development, the quadrotor dynamics are expressed in a control-oriented form, which explicitly incorporates the uncertainty in the gyroscopic term and control actuation term. An adaptive robust nonlinear control law is then designed to stabilize both the position and attitude loops of the quadrotor system. A rigorous Lyapunov-based analysis is utilized to prove asymptotic trajectory tracking, where the region of convergence can be made arbitrarily large through judicious control gain selection. Moreover, the stability analysis formally addresses gyroscopic effects and actuator uncertainty. To illustrate the performance of the control law, comparative numerical simulation results are provided, which demonstrate the improved closed-loop performance achieved under varying levels of parametric uncertainty and disturbance magnitudes

Hybrid visual servoing with hierarchical task composition for aerial manipulation

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper a hybrid visual servoing with a hierarchical task-composition control framework is described for aerial manipulation, i.e. for the control of an aerial vehicle endowed with a robot arm. The proposed approach suitably combines into a unique hybrid-control framework the main benefits of both image-based and position-based control schemes. Moreover, the underactuation of the aerial vehicle has been explicitly taken into account in a general formulation, together with a dynamic smooth activation mechanism. Both simulation case studies and experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed technique.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Mechanical Design, Modelling and Control of a Novel Aerial Manipulator

In this paper a novel aerial manipulation system is proposed. The mechanical structure of the system, the number of thrusters and their geometry will be derived from technical optimization problems. The aforementioned problems are defined by taking into consideration the desired actuation forces and torques applied to the end-effector of the system. The framework of the proposed system is designed in a CAD Package in order to evaluate the system parameter values. Following this, the kinematic and dynamic models are developed and an adaptive backstepping controller is designed aiming to control the exact position and orientation of the end-effector in the Cartesian space. Finally, the performance of the system is demonstrated through a simulation study, where a manipulation task scenario is investigated.Comment: Comments: 8 Pages, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '15), Seattle, WA, US

Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review

Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatil- ity and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature review of general aerial robotics and space manipulation is carried out as well

Design of Ad Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks Formed by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with Advanced Mechanical Automation

Ad hoc wireless mesh networks formed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with wireless transceivers (access points (APs)) are increasingly being touted as being able to provide a flexible "on-the-fly" communications infrastructure that can collect and transmit sensor data from sensors in remote, wilderness, or disaster-hit areas. Recent advances in the mechanical automation of UAVs have resulted in separable APs and replaceable batteries that can be carried by UAVs and placed at arbitrary locations in the field. These advanced mechanized UAV mesh networks pose interesting questions in terms of the design of the network architecture and the optimal UAV scheduling algorithms. This paper studies a range of network architectures that depend on the mechanized automation (AP separation and battery replacement) capabilities of UAVs and proposes heuristic UAV scheduling algorithms for each network architecture, which are benchmarked against optimal designs.Comment: 12 page