A survey on fractional order control techniques for unmanned aerial and ground vehicles

In recent years, numerous applications of science and engineering for modeling and control of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) systems based on fractional calculus have been realized. The extra fractional order derivative terms allow to optimizing the performance of the systems. The review presented in this paper focuses on the control problems of the UAVs and UGVs that have been addressed by the fractional order techniques over the last decade

Modeling and Control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Port-Hamiltonian Approach

Recently, in robotics there is an increasing interest in the field of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) due to the existence of diverse potential applications in the civilian sector. UAVs are characterized by their under-actuatedness and\ud highly nonlinear and inherently coupled dynamics, which makes the design of an autonomous controller challenging. To address this problem, developing a competent dynamic model of the UAV is an essential step. Such a dynamic..

Circular formation control of fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds

In this paper we propose an algorithm for stabilizing circular formations of fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds. The algorithm is based on the idea of tracking circles with different radii in order to control the inter-vehicle phases with respect to a target circumference. We prove that the desired equilibrium is exponentially stable and thanks to the guidance vector field that guides the vehicles, the algorithm can be extended to other closed trajectories. One of the main advantages of this approach is that the algorithm guarantees the confinement of the team in a specific area, even when communications or sensing among vehicles are lost. We show the effectiveness of the algorithm with an actual formation flight of three aircraft. The algorithm is ready to use for the general public in the open-source Paparazzi autopilot.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to IROS 201