Suspended Load Path Tracking Control Using a Tilt-rotor UAV Based on Zonotopic State Estimation

This work addresses the problem of path tracking control of a suspended load using a tilt-rotor UAV. The main challenge in controlling this kind of system arises from the dynamic behavior imposed by the load, which is usually coupled to the UAV by means of a rope, adding unactuated degrees of freedom to the whole system. Furthermore, to perform the load transportation it is often needed the knowledge of the load position to accomplish the task. Since available sensors are commonly embedded in the mobile platform, information on the load position may not be directly available. To solve this problem in this work, initially, the kinematics of the multi-body mechanical system are formulated from the load's perspective, from which a detailed dynamic model is derived using the Euler-Lagrange approach, yielding a highly coupled, nonlinear state-space representation of the system, affine in the inputs, with the load's position and orientation directly represented by state variables. A zonotopic state estimator is proposed to solve the problem of estimating the load position and orientation, which is formulated based on sensors located at the aircraft, with different sampling times, and unknown-but-bounded measurement noise. To solve the path tracking problem, a discrete-time mixed $\mathcal{H}_2/\mathcal{H}_\infty$ controller with pole-placement constraints is designed with guaranteed time-response properties and robust to unmodeled dynamics, parametric uncertainties, and external disturbances. Results from numerical experiments, performed in a platform based on the Gazebo simulator and on a Computer Aided Design (CAD) model of the system, are presented to corroborate the performance of the zonotopic state estimator along with the designed controller

Stable Gaussian Process based Tracking Control of Lagrangian Systems

High performance tracking control can only be achieved if a good model of the dynamics is available. However, such a model is often difficult to obtain from first order physics only. In this paper, we develop a data-driven control law that ensures closed loop stability of Lagrangian systems. For this purpose, we use Gaussian Process regression for the feed-forward compensation of the unknown dynamics of the system. The gains of the feedback part are adapted based on the uncertainty of the learned model. Thus, the feedback gains are kept low as long as the learned model describes the true system sufficiently precisely. We show how to select a suitable gain adaption law that incorporates the uncertainty of the model to guarantee a globally bounded tracking error. A simulation with a robot manipulator demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed control law.Comment: Please cite the conference paper. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1806.0719

Optimal Control of Unknown Nonlinear System From Inputoutput Data

Optimal control designers usually require a plant model to design a controller. The problem is the controller\u27s performance heavily depends on the accuracy of the plant model. However, in many situations, it is very time-consuming to implement the system identification procedure and an accurate structure of a plant model is very difficult to obtain. On the other hand, neuro-fuzzy models with product inference engine, singleton fuzzifier, center average defuzzifier, and Gaussian membership functions can be easily trained by many well-established learning algorithms based on given input-output data pairs. Therefore, this kind of model is used in the current optimal controller design. Two approaches of designing optimal controllers of unknown nonlinear systems based on neuro-fuzzy models are presented in the thesis. The first approach first utilizes neuro-fuzzy models to approximate the unknown nonlinear systems, and then the feasible-direction algorithm is used to achieve the numerical solution of the Euler-Lagrange equations of the formulated optimal control problem. This algorithm uses the steepest descent to find the search direction and then apply a one-dimensional search routine to find the best step length. Finally several nonlinear optimal control problems are simulated and the results show that the performance of the proposed approach is quite similar to that of optimal control to the system represented by an explicit mathematical model. However, due to the limitation of the feasible-direction algorithm, this method cannot be applied to highly nonlinear and dimensional plants. Therefore, another approach that can overcome these drawbacks is proposed. This method utilizes Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy models to design the optimal controller. TS fuzzy models are first derived from the direct linearization of the neuro-fuzzy models, which is close to the local linearization of the nonlinear dynamic systems. The operating points are chosen so that the TS fuzzy model is a good approximation of the neuro-fuzzy model. Based on the TS fuzzy model, the optimal control is implemented for a nonlinear two-link flexible robot and a rigid asymmetric spacecraft, thus providing the possibility of implementing the well-established optimal control method on unknown nonlinear dynamic systems