UAV Control in Close Proximities - Ceiling Effect on Battery Lifetime

With the recent developments in the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), it is expected them to interact and collaborate with their surrounding objects, other robots and people in order to wisely plan and execute particular tasks. Although these interaction operations are inherently challenging as compared to free-flight missions, they might bring diverse advantages. One of them is their basic aerodynamic interaction during the flight in close proximities which can result in a reduction of the controller effort. In this study, by collecting real-time data, we have observed that the current drawn by the battery can be decreased while flying very close to the surroundings with the help of the ceiling effect. For the first time, this phenomenon is analyzed in terms of battery lifetime degradation by using a simple full equivalent cycle counting method. Results show that cycling related effect on battery degradation can be reduced by a 15.77% if the UAV can utilize ceiling effect.Comment: ICoIAS 201

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for the Stabilization of a Wheeled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle on a Pipe

This letter addresses the task of stabilizing a wheeled unmanned aerial vehicle on a pipe, which is an emerging applica- tion in oil and gas facilities for nondestructive measurements. After the derivation of the dynamic model of the system, a discrete-time nonlinear model predictive controller is designed over a finite horizon. The analysis of the asymptotic stability of the designed controller is carried out. Numerical tests show the performance and the robustness of the proposed solution

Model Predictive Control for Micro Aerial Vehicles: A Survey

This paper presents a review of the design and application of model predictive control strategies for Micro Aerial Vehicles and specifically multirotor configurations such as quadrotors. The diverse set of works in the domain is organized based on the control law being optimized over linear or nonlinear dynamics, the integration of state and input constraints, possible fault-tolerant design, if reinforcement learning methods have been utilized and if the controller refers to free-flight or other tasks such as physical interaction or load transportation. A selected set of comparison results are also presented and serve to provide insight for the selection between linear and nonlinear schemes, the tuning of the prediction horizon, the importance of disturbance observer-based offset-free tracking and the intrinsic robustness of such methods to parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, an overview of recent research trends on the combined application of modern deep reinforcement learning techniques and model predictive control for multirotor vehicles is presented. Finally, this review concludes with explicit discussion regarding selected open-source software packages that deliver off-the-shelf model predictive control functionality applicable to a wide variety of Micro Aerial Vehicle configurations