Dynamic Landing of an Autonomous Quadrotor on a Moving Platform in Turbulent Wind Conditions

Autonomous landing on a moving platform presents unique challenges for multirotor vehicles, including the need to accurately localize the platform, fast trajectory planning, and precise/robust control. Previous works studied this problem but most lack explicit consideration of the wind disturbance, which typically leads to slow descents onto the platform. This work presents a fully autonomous vision-based system that addresses these limitations by tightly coupling the localization, planning, and control, thereby enabling fast and accurate landing on a moving platform. The platform's position, orientation, and velocity are estimated by an extended Kalman filter using simulated GPS measurements when the quadrotor-platform distance is large, and by a visual fiducial system when the platform is nearby. The landing trajectory is computed online using receding horizon control and is followed by a boundary layer sliding controller that provides tracking performance guarantees in the presence of unknown, but bounded, disturbances. To improve the performance, the characteristics of the turbulent conditions are accounted for in the controller. The landing trajectory is fast, direct, and does not require hovering over the platform, as is typical of most state-of-the-art approaches. Simulations and hardware experiments are presented to validate the robustness of the approach.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, ICRA2020 accepted pape

La conoscenza spaziale degli ambienti di grande scala dimensionale: uno studio preliminare planning-oriented

Lo studio degli ambienti spaziali si è evoluto considerevolmente nel tempo, seguendo diverse prospettive. In accordo con la prospettiva cognitivista, gli spazi sono entità ad alta densità di conoscenza nei quali gli agenti umani si muovono in maniera flessibile per tutto l'arco della loro vita. Riconoscere e comprendere gli elementi caratterizzanti tali spazi, pertanto, diventa fondamentale per una efficace pianificazione e per i processi di decision-making ambientale, sia a livello urbano che regionale, poiché essi rappresentano elementi strutturali e resilienti. La cognizione dello spazio si sviluppa anche attraverso elementi taciti o impliciti quali percezioni, emozioni, sensazioni. Questo lavoro rappresenta un tentativo preliminare di riconoscere questi elementi in ambienti a popolazione estremamente ridotta come gli spazi rurali. Trattandosi di aree scarsamente strutturate rispetto agli insediamenti urbani, percezioni, sensazioni ed emozioni diventano variabili particolarmente importanti per l'interpretazione e la strutturazione degli spazi

A stream scheduling scheme based on local regularity of internet traffic

Orientador: Lee Luan LingDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Nas redes de comunicações, a atual integração de vários tipos de serviços, cada qual com características estatísticas e requisitos de qualidade de serviço distintos, traz consigo a necessidade de esquemas eficientes de gerenciamento e controle de congestionamento do tráfego presente. Em pequenas escalas de tempo, os esquemas atuais podem ter sua eficiência reduzida devido à alta irregularidade do tráfego. Desta forma, neste presente trabalho, tendo como base à disciplina de escalonamento Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS), propõe-se um esquema de escalonamento de fluxos de dados que utiliza o expoente de Hölder pontual para caracterização local de cada fluxo. Para isso, propõe-se conjuntamente um estimador dinâmico destes expoentes e um preditor. Os expoentes de Hölder pontuais são estimados dinamicamente por meio do decaimento dos coeficientes wavelets em janelas de tempo. O preditor proposto possui características adaptativas e baseia-se no filtro de Kalman e no filtro de Mínimos Médios Quadrados Normalizado (Normalized Least-Mean-Square - NLMS). As avaliações realizadas mostram que este esquema de escalonamento contribui para o controle dinâmico preventivo no sentido de se obter uma menor perda de dados e um melhor uso da taxa de transmissão do enlace, em comparação com o GPS convencionalAbstract: Today network traffic is composed of many services with different statistical characteristics and quality of service requirements. This integration needs efficient traffic congestion control and management schemes. Dynamic and preventive schemes usually anticipate traffic conditions by means of a prediction process. Nevertheless, at fine-grained time scales, traffic exhibits strong irregularities and more complex scaling law that make this prediction process a non-trivial task. In this work we model network traffic flows as multifractal processes and introduce the pointwise Hölder exponent as an indicator of the local regularity degree. Also we propose a new traffic flow scheduling scheme based on the Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) discipline that incorporate the pointwise Hölder exponent to locally characterize each data flow. For this end we explicitly present both dynamic pointwise Hölder exponent estimation and prediction mechanisms. The pointwise Hölder estimation is carried out dynamically based on the decay of the wavelet coefficients in the selected time windows. The proposed predictor is adaptive and implemented with both Kalman and Normalized Least Mean Squares (NLMS) filters. Experimental evaluations have validated the proposed scheduling scheme, resulting in low data loss rate and a better sharing of the network resources in comparison with the usual GPS schemeMestradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaMestre em Engenharia Elétric

Detail Enhancing Denoising of Digitized 3D Models from a Mobile Scanning System

The acquisition process of digitizing a large-scale environment produces an enormous amount of raw geometry data. This data is corrupted by system noise, which leads to 3D surfaces that are not smooth and details that are distorted. Any scanning system has noise associate with the scanning hardware, both digital quantization errors and measurement inaccuracies, but a mobile scanning system has additional system noise introduced by the pose estimation of the hardware during data acquisition. The combined system noise generates data that is not handled well by existing noise reduction and smoothing techniques. This research is focused on enhancing the 3D models acquired by mobile scanning systems used to digitize large-scale environments. These digitization systems combine a variety of sensors – including laser range scanners, video cameras, and pose estimation hardware – on a mobile platform for the quick acquisition of 3D models of real world environments. The data acquired by such systems are extremely noisy, often with significant details being on the same order of magnitude as the system noise. By utilizing a unique 3D signal analysis tool, a denoising algorithm was developed that identifies regions of detail and enhances their geometry, while removing the effects of noise on the overall model. The developed algorithm can be useful for a variety of digitized 3D models, not just those involving mobile scanning systems. The challenges faced in this study were the automatic processing needs of the enhancement algorithm, and the need to fill a hole in the area of 3D model analysis in order to reduce the effect of system noise on the 3D models. In this context, our main contributions are the automation and integration of a data enhancement method not well known to the computer vision community, and the development of a novel 3D signal decomposition and analysis tool. The new technologies featured in this document are intuitive extensions of existing methods to new dimensionality and applications. The totality of the research has been applied towards detail enhancing denoising of scanned data from a mobile range scanning system, and results from both synthetic and real models are presented