CHAOS SYNCHRONIZATION USING SUPER-TWISTING SLIDING MODE CONTROL APPLIED ON CHUA’S CIRCUIT

Chua’s circuit is the classic chaotic system and the most widely used in serval areas due to its potential for secure communication. However, developing an accurate chaos control strategy is one of the most challenging works for Chua’s circuit. This study proposes a new application of super twisting algorithm (STC) based on sliding mode control (SMC) to eliminate or synchronize the chaos behavior in the circuit. Therefore, the proposed control strategy is robust against uncertainty and effectively regulates the system with a good regulation tracking task. Using the Lyapunov stability, the property of asymptotical stability is verified. The whole of the system including the (control strategy, and Chua’s circuit) is implemented under a suitable test setup based on dSpace1104 to validate the effectiveness of our proposed control scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed control method can effectively eliminate or synchronize the chaos in the Chua's circuit

A Hybrid Controller for Stability Robustness, Performance Robustness, and Disturbance Attenuation of a Maglev System

Devices using magnetic levitation (maglev) offer the potential for friction-free, high-speed, and high-precision operation. Applications include frictionless bearings, high-speed ground transportation systems, wafer distribution systems, high-precision positioning stages, and vibration isolation tables. Maglev systems rely on feedback controllers to maintain stable levitation. Designing such feedback controllers is challenging since mathematically the electromagnetic force is nonlinear and there is no local minimum point on the levitating force function. As a result, maglev systems are open-loop unstable. Additionally, maglev systems experience disturbances and system parameter variations (uncertainties) during operation. A successful controller design for maglev system guarantees stability during levitating despite system nonlinearity, and desirable system performance despite disturbances and system uncertainties. This research investigates five controllers that can achieve stable levitation: PD, PID, lead, model reference control, and LQR/LQG. It proposes an acceleration feedback controller (AFC) design that attenuates disturbance on a maglev system with a PD controller. This research proposes three robust controllers, QFT, Hinf , and QFT/Hinf , followed by a novel AFC-enhanced QFT/Hinf (AQH) controller. The AQH controller allows system robustness and disturbance attenuation to be achieved in one controller design. The controller designs are validated through simulations and experiments. In this research, the disturbances are represented by force disturbances on the levitated object, and the system uncertainties are represented by parameter variations. The experiments are conducted on a 1 DOF maglev testbed, with system performance including stability, disturbance rejection, and robustness being evaluated. Experiments show that the tested controllers can maintain stable levitation. Disturbance attenuation is achieved with the AFC. The robust controllers, QFT, Hinf , QFT/ Hinf, and AQH successfully guarantee system robustness. In addition, AQH controller provides the maglev system with a disturbance attenuation feature. The contributions of this research are the design and implementation of the acceleration feedback controller, the QFT/ Hinf , and the AQH controller. Disturbance attenuation and system robustness are achieved with these controllers. The controllers developed in this research are applicable to similar maglev systems

Attitude control for a quadrotor UAV using adaptive fuzzy backstepping

With improvements on automation, computer, electronics and other technologies, applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have expanded from pure military field to civilian areas. As a multirotor aircraft, a quadrotor UAV has the advantages of simple structure, small size, high manoeuvrability, etc. On the basis of summarizing the current research situation of the quadrotor UAV, a deep research has been conducted on the attitude control system of the quadrotor UAV and two controllers are proposed to generate a stable performance: Back-stepping controller, adaptive fuzzy back-stepping nonlinear controller. The quadrotor UAV consists of two pairs of rotors and propellers, which can generate thrust and air drag. The dynamic model is derived using the Euler-Lagrangian method and Newton method with 6 degrees of freedom. To represent the model of the quadrotor, Euler angles representation is first derived. However, facing the gimbal lock drawback of Euler angles representation, unit quaternion representation is then discussed afterwards. In normal situations, model parameter uncertainties and external disturbances would affect the system output. Due to this problem, an adaptive fuzzy strategy is designed to approximate the uncertain model using back-stepping techniques with the Lyapunov stability theorem. Firstly, simulations are used to prove the mathematical feasibility. And then experimental results will be provided to illustrate the satisfactory performances of the proposed approach in real time

Recent Advances in Robust Control

Robust control has been a topic of active research in the last three decades culminating in H_2/H_\infty and \mu design methods followed by research on parametric robustness, initially motivated by Kharitonov's theorem, the extension to non-linear time delay systems, and other more recent methods. The two volumes of Recent Advances in Robust Control give a selective overview of recent theoretical developments and present selected application examples. The volumes comprise 39 contributions covering various theoretical aspects as well as different application areas. The first volume covers selected problems in the theory of robust control and its application to robotic and electromechanical systems. The second volume is dedicated to special topics in robust control and problem specific solutions. Recent Advances in Robust Control will be a valuable reference for those interested in the recent theoretical advances and for researchers working in the broad field of robotics and mechatronics

Cognitive Vehicle Platooning in the Era of Automated Electric Transportation

Vehicle platooning is an important innovation in the automotive industry that aims at improving safety, mileage, efficiency, and the time needed to travel. This research focuses on the various aspects of vehicle platooning, one of the important aspects being analysis of different control strategies that lead to a stable and robust platoon. Safety of passengers being a very important consideration, the control design should be such that the controller remains robust under uncertain environments. As a part of the Department of Energy (DOE) project, this research also tries to show a demonstration of vehicle platooning using robots. In an automated highway scenario, a vehicle platoon can be thought of as a string of vehicles, following one another as a platoon. Being equipped by wireless communication capabilities, these vehicles communicate with one another to maintain their formation as a platoon, hence are cognitive. Autonomous capable vehicles in tightly spaced, computer-controlled platoons will lead to savings in energy due to reduced aerodynamic forces, as well as increased passenger comfort since there will be no sudden accelerations or decelerations. Impacts in the occurrence of collisions, if any, will be very low. The greatest benefit obtained is, however, an increase in highway capacity, along with reduction in traffic congestion, pollution, and energy consumption. Another aspect of this project is the automated electric transportation (AET). This aims at providing energy directly to vehicles from electric highways, thus reducing their energy consumption and CO2 emission. By eliminating the use of overhead wires, infrastructure can be upgraded by electrifying highways and providing energy on demand and in real time to moving vehicles via a wireless energy transfer phenomenon known as wireless inductive coupling. The work done in this research will help to gain an insight into vehicle platooning and the control system related to maintaining the vehicles in this formation

Reliable and Safe Motion Control of Unmanned Vehicles

Unmanned vehicles (UVs) are playing an increasingly significant role in modern daily life. In the past decades, numerous commercial, scientific, and military communities across the world are developing fully autonomous UVs for a variety of applications, such as environmental monitoring and surveillance, post-disaster search and rescue, border patrol, natural resources exploration, and experimental platforms for new technologies verification. The excessive opportunities and threats that come along with these diverse applications have created a niche demand for UVs to extend their capabilities to perform more sophisticated and hazardous missions with greater autonomy, lower costs of development and operation, improved personnel safety and security, extended operational range (reliability) and precision, as well as increased flexibility in sophisticated environments including so-called dirty, dull, harsh, and dangerous missions. In order to successfully and effectively execute missions and meet their corresponding performance criteria and overcome these ever-increasing challenges, greater autonomy together with more advanced reliable and safe motion control systems are required to offer the critical technologies for ensuring intelligent, safe, reliable, and efficient control of UVs in the presence of disturbances, actuator saturation, and even actuator faults, especially for practical applications. This thesis concentrates on the development of different reliable and safe motion control algorithms/strategies applicable to UVs, in particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). A number of contributions pertaining to the fault detection and diagnosis (FDD), fault-tolerant control (FTC), disturbance estimation and compensation, and actuator saturation avoidance have been made in this thesis. In addition to the control problems, this thesis also presents several guidance-related contributions, including adaptive observer-based line-of-sight (LOS) guidance law, time-varying lookahead distance scheme, piecewise path switching criterion for guiding a single UV, as well as a proportional-integral (PI) type of leader-follower formation guidance strategy for a group of UVs

Feasible, Robust and Reliable Automation and Control for Autonomous Systems

The Special Issue book focuses on highlighting current research and developments in the automation and control field for autonomous systems as well as showcasing state-of-the-art control strategy approaches for autonomous platforms. The book is co-edited by distinguished international control system experts currently based in Sweden, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom, with contributions from reputable researchers from China, Austria, France, the United States of America, Poland, and Hungary, among many others. The editors believe the ten articles published within this Special Issue will be highly appealing to control-systems-related researchers in applications typified in the fields of ground, aerial, maritime vehicles, and robotics as well as industrial audiences

Study and suppression of vibrations in rotary-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This document contains the details of the thesis titled Study and suppression of vibrations in rotary-wing Uumanned Aerial Vehicles, which focuses on the study of vibrations of the so called quadrotors, which are formed by four rotors equispaced around a central structure. Due to the morphological characteristics of the quadrotors, they present high manoeuvrability and better payload than other rotary-wing UAV configurations, reason why their use and study has increased in the last past years. Because quadrotors are unmanned vehicles, very often autonomous, they rely completely on the information they receive from the available sensors, and therefore, their performance should be improved as much as possible. It is then necessary to keep the undesirable vehicle's oscillations to the minimum as the measurement systems can obtain better readings, reducing the need for data processing, this is, reducing the energy consumption and increasing the vehicle's autonomy. To reduce vibrations appearance and isolate their transmission, it is essential to deeply understand the mechanisms associated to the appearance and transmission of the oscillations in the vehicle, originated both from the external environment and from the vehicle itself. In order to do so, an extensive study of the vehicle's vibrational behaviour has been carried out here. The main sources of vibrations have been identified and effective solutions have been proposed for the reduction of the oscillations production and transmission, as an appropriate selection of materials and a predictor-corrector control methodology. Also the effect of rotor defects on the vehicle behaviour has been studied, and software and hardware modifications have been designed and implemented in the model in order to improve the vehicle performance, even in presence of rotor severe structural damage