Torque vectoring based drive assistance system for turning an electric narrow tilting vehicle

The increasing number of cars leads to traffic congestion and limits parking issue in urban area. The narrow tilting vehicles therefore can potentially become the next generation of city cars due to its narrow width. However, due to the difficulty in leaning a narrow tilting vehicle, a drive assistance strategy is required to maintain its roll stability during a turn. This article presents an effective approach using torque vectoring method to assist the rider in balancing the narrow tilting vehicles, thus reducing the counter-steering requirements. The proposed approach is designed as the combination of two torque controllers: steer angle–based torque vectoring controller and tilting compensator–based torque vectoring controller. The steer angle–based torque vectoring controller reduces the counter-steering process via adjusting the vectoring torque based on the steering angle from the rider. Meanwhile, the tilting compensator–based torque vectoring controller develops the steer angle–based torque vectoring with an additional tilting compensator to help balancing the leaning behaviour of narrow tilting vehicles. Numerical simulations with a number of case studies have been carried out to verify the performance of designed controllers. The results imply that the counter-steering process can be eliminated and the roll stability performance can be improved with the usage of the presented approach

A Distributed Model Predictive Control Framework for Road-Following Formation Control of Car-like Vehicles (Extended Version)

This work presents a novel framework for the formation control of multiple autonomous ground vehicles in an on-road environment. Unique challenges of this problem lie in 1) the design of collision avoidance strategies with obstacles and with other vehicles in a highly structured environment, 2) dynamic reconfiguration of the formation to handle different task specifications. In this paper, we design a local MPC-based tracking controller for each individual vehicle to follow a reference trajectory while satisfying various constraints (kinematics and dynamics, collision avoidance, \textit{etc.}). The reference trajectory of a vehicle is computed from its leader's trajectory, based on a pre-defined formation tree. We use logic rules to organize the collision avoidance behaviors of member vehicles. Moreover, we propose a methodology to safely reconfigure the formation on-the-fly. The proposed framework has been validated using high-fidelity simulations.Comment: Extended version of the conference paper submission on ICARCV'1

Voliro: An Omnidirectional Hexacopter With Tiltable Rotors

Extending the maneuverability of unmanned areal vehicles promises to yield a considerable increase in the areas in which these systems can be used. Some such applications are the performance of more complicated inspection tasks and the generation of complex uninterrupted movements of an attached camera. In this paper we address this challenge by presenting Voliro, a novel aerial platform that combines the advantages of existing multi-rotor systems with the agility of omnidirectionally controllable platforms. We propose the use of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors allowing the system to decouple the control of position and orientation. The contributions of this work involve the mechanical design as well as a controller with the corresponding allocation scheme. This work also discusses the design challenges involved when turning the concept of a hexacopter with tiltable rotors into an actual prototype. The agility of the system is demonstrated and evaluated in real- world experiments.Comment: Submitted to Robotics and Automation Magazin