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

Platooning-based control techniques in transportation and logistic

This thesis explores the integration of autonomous vehicle technology with smart manufacturing systems. At first, essential control methods for autonomous vehicles, including Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs), Linear Quadratic Regulation (LQR)/Linear Quadratic Tracking (LQT), PID controllers, and dynamic control logic via flowcharts, are examined. These techniques are adapted for platooning to enhance coordination, safety, and efficiency within vehicle fleets, and various scenarios are analyzed to confirm their effectiveness in achieving predetermined performance goals such as inter-vehicle distance and fuel consumption. A first approach on simplified hardware, yet realistic to model the vehicle's behavior, is treated to further prove the theoretical results. Subsequently, performance improvement in smart manufacturing systems (SMS) is treated. The focus is placed on offline and online scheduling techniques exploiting Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to model the shop floor and Model Predictive Control (MPC) to adapt scheduling to unforeseen events, in order to understand how optimization algorithms and decision-making frameworks can transform resource allocation and production processes, ultimately improving manufacturing efficiency. In the final part of the work, platooning techniques are employed within SMS. Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are reimagined as autonomous vehicles, grouping them within platoon formations according to different criteria, and controlled to avoid collisions while carrying out production orders. This strategic integration applies platooning principles to transform AGV logistics within the SMS. The impact of AGV platooning on key performance metrics, such as makespan, is devised, providing insights into optimizing manufacturing processes. Throughout this work, various research fields are examined, with intersecting future technologies from precise control in autonomous vehicles to the coordination of manufacturing resources. This thesis provides a comprehensive view of how optimization and automation can reshape efficiency and productivity not only in the domain of autonomous vehicles but also in manufacturing

Path Planning and Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Mobile Robots Using Cuckoo–Beetle Swarm Search Algorithms with Applications in UGV Obstacle Avoidance

In this paper, a new meta-heuristic path planning algorithm, the cuckoo–beetle swarm search (CBSS) algorithm, is introduced to solve the path planning problems of heterogeneous mobile robots. Traditional meta-heuristic algorithms, e.g., genetic algorithms (GA), particle swarm search (PSO), beetle swarm optimization (BSO), and cuckoo search (CS), have problems such as the tenancy to become trapped in local minima because of premature convergence and a weakness in global search capability in path planning. Note that the CBSS algorithm imitates the biological habits of cuckoo and beetle herds and thus has good robustness and global optimization ability. In addition, computer simulations verify the accuracy, search speed, energy efficiency and stability of the CBSS algorithm. The results of the real-world experiment prove that the proposed CBSS algorithm is much better than its counterparts. Finally, the CBSS algorithm is applied to 2D path planning and 3D path planning in heterogeneous mobile robots. In contrast to its counterparts, the CBSS algorithm is guaranteed to find the shortest global optimal path in different sizes and types of maps

Time-varying sliding mode controller for heat exchanger with dragonfly algorithm

This article proposes the design of a sliding mode controller with a time-varying sliding surface for the plate heat exchanger. A time-varying sliding mode controller (TVSMC) combines the benefit of the control system’s robustness and convergence rate. Using Lyapunov stability theory, the stability of the designed controller is proved. In addition, the controller parameters of the designed controller are specified optimally via the dragonfly algorithm (DA). The input constraint’s effect is considered in the controller design process by applying the concept of the auxiliary system. The bounded disturbances are applied to investigate the robustness of the proposed techniques. Moreover, the quasi-sliding mode controller (QSMC) is developed as a benchmark to evaluate the convergence behavior of the proposed TVSMC technique. The simulation results demonstrate the proposed TVSMC with the optimal parameters provided by the DA algorithm (TVSMC+DA) can regulate the temperature to the desired level under bounded disturbances. When compared to the QSMC method, the TVSMC+DA performs significantly faster convergence speed and greater reduction in chattering occurrence. The results clearly indicate that the proposed controller can enhance convergence properties while being robust to disturbances

Unmanned Robotic Systems and Applications

This book presents recent studies of unmanned robotic systems and their applications. With its five chapters, the book brings together important contributions from renowned international researchers. Unmanned autonomous robots are ideal candidates for applications such as rescue missions, especially in areas that are difficult to access. Swarm robotics (multiple robots working together) is another exciting application of the unmanned robotics systems, for example, coordinated search by an interconnected group of moving robots for the purpose of finding a source of hazardous emissions. These robots can behave like individuals working in a group without a centralized control

Parameter tuning and cooperative control for automated guided vehicles

For several practical control engineering applications it is desirable that multiple systems can operate independently as well as in cooperation with each other. Especially when the transition between individual and cooperative behavior and vice versa can be carried out easily, this results in ??exible and scalable systems. A subclass is formed by systems that are physically separated during individual operation, and very tightly coupled during cooperative operation. One particular application of multiple systems that can operate independently as well as in concert with each other is the cooperative transportation of a large object by multiple Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs). AGVs are used in industry to transport all kinds of goods, ranging from small trays of compact and video discs to pallets and 40-tonne coils of steel. Current applications typically comprise a ??eet of AGVs, and the vehicles transport products on an individual basis. Recently there has been an increasing demand to transport very large objects such as sewer pipes, rotor blades of wind turbines and pieces of scenery for theaters, which may reach lengths of over thirty meters. A realistic option is to let several AGVs operate together to handle these types of loads. This Ph.D. thesis describes the development, implementation, and testing of distributed control algorithms for transporting a load by two or more Automated Guided Vehicles in industrial environments. We focused on the situations where the load is connected to the AGVs by means of (semi-)rigid interconnections. Attention was restricted to control on the velocity level, which we regard as an intermediate step for achieving fully automatic operation. In our setup the motion setpoint is provided by an external host. The load is assumed to be already present on the vehicles. Docking and grasping procedures are not considered. The project is a collaboration between the company FROG Navigation Systems (Utrecht, The Netherlands) and the Control Systems group of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. FROG provided testing facilities including two omni-directional AGVs. Industrial AGVs are custom made for the transportation tasks at hand and come in a variety of forms. To reduce development times it is desirable to follow a model-based control design approach as this allows generalization to a broad class of vehicles. We have adopted rigid body modeling techniques from the ??eld of robotic manipulators to derive the equations of motion for the AGVs and load in a systematic way. These models are based on physical considerations such as Newton's second law and the positions and dimensions of the wheels, sensors, and actuators. Special emphasis is put on the modeling of the wheel-??oor interaction, for which we have adopted tire models that stem from the ??eld of vehicle dynamics. The resulting models have a clear physical interpretation and capture a large class of vehicles with arbitrary wheel con??gurations. This ensures us that the controllers, which are based on these models, are applicable to a broad class of vehicles. An important prerequisite for achieving smooth cooperative behavior is that the individual AGVs operate at the required accuracy. The performance of an individual AGV is directly related to the precision of the estimates for the odometric parameters, i.e. the effective wheel diameters and the offsets of the encoders that measure the steering angles of the wheels. Cooperative transportation applications will typically require AGVs that are highly maneuverable, which means that all the wheels of an individual AGV ahould be able to steer. Since there will be more than one steering angle encoder, the identi??cation of the odometric parameters is substantially more dif??cult for these omni-directional AGVs than for the mobile wheeled robots that are commonly seen in literature and laboratory settings. In this thesis we present a novel procedure for simultaneously estimating effective wheel diameters and steering angle encoder offsets by driving several pure circle segments. The validity of the tuning procedure is con??rmed by experiments with the two omni-directional test vehicles with varying loads. An interesting result is that the effective wheel diameters of the rubber wheels of our AGVs increase with increasing load. A crucial aspect in all control designs is the reconstruction of the to-be-controlled variables from measurement data. Our to-be-controlled variables are the planar motion of the load and the motions of the AGVs with respect to the load, which have to be reconstruct from the odometric sensor information. The odometric sensor information consists of the drive encoder and steering encoder readings. We analyzed the observability of an individual AGV and proved that it is theoretically possible to reconstruct its complete motion from the odometric measurements. Due to practical considerations, we pursued a more pragmatic least-squares based observer design. We show that the least-squares based motion estimate is independent of the coordinate system that is being used. The motion estimator was subsequently analyzed in a stochastic setting. The relation between the motion estimator and the estimated velocity of an arbitrary point on the vehicle was explored. We derived how the covariance of the velocity estimate of an arbitrary point on the vehicle is related to the covariance of the motion estimate. We proved that there is one unique point on the vehicle for which the covariance of the estimated velocity is minimal. Next, we investigated how the local motion estimates of the individual AGVs can be combined to yield one global estimate. When the load and AGVs are rigidly interconnected, it suf??ces that each AGVs broadcasts its local motion estimate and receives the estimates of the other AGVs. When the load is semi-rigidly interconnected to the AGVs, e.g. by means of revolute or prismatic joints, then generally each AGV needs to broadcasts the corresponding information matrix as well. We showed that the information matrix remains constant when the load is connected to the AGV with a revolute joint that is mounted at the aforementioned unique point with the smallest velocity estimate covariance. This means that the corresponding AGV does not have to broadcast its information matrix for this special situation. The key issue in the control design for cooperative transportation tasks is that the various AGVs must not counteract each others' actions. The decentralized controller that we derived makes the AGVs track an externally provided planar motion setpoint while minimizing the interconnection forces between the load and the vehicles. Although the control design is applicable to cooperative transportation by multiple AGVs with arbitrary semi-rigid AGV-load interconnections, it is noteworthy that a particularly elegant solution arises when all interconnections are completely rigid. Then the derived local controllers have the same structure as the controllers that are normally used for individual operation. As a result, changing a few parameter settings and providing the AGVs with identical setpoints is all that is required to achieve cooperative behavior on the velocity level for this situation. The observer and controller designs for the case that the AGVs are completely rigidly interconnected to the load were successfully implemented on the two test vehicles. Experi ments were carried out with and without a load that consisted of a pallet with 300 kg pave stones. The results were reproducible and illustrated the practical validity of the observer and controller designs. There were no substantial drawbacks when the local observers used only their local sensor information, which means that our setup can also operate satisfactory when the velocity estimates are not shared with the other vehicles

Proceeding Of Mechanical Engineering Research Day 2016 (MERD’16)

This Open Access e-Proceeding contains a compilation of 105 selected papers from the Mechanical Engineering Research Day 2016 (MERD’16) event, which is held in Kampus Teknologi, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) - Melaka, Malaysia, on 31 March 2016. The theme chosen for this event is ‘IDEA. INSPIRE. INNOVATE’. It was gratifying to all of us when the response for MERD’16 is overwhelming as the technical committees received more than 200 submissions from various areas of mechanical engineering. After a peer-review process, the editors have accepted 105 papers for the e-proceeding that cover 7 main themes. This open access e-Proceeding can be viewed or downloaded at www3.utem.edu.my/care/proceedings. We hope that these proceeding will serve as a valuable reference for researchers. With the large number of submissions from the researchers in other faculties, the event has achieved its main objective which is to bring together educators, researchers and practitioners to share their findings and perhaps sustaining the research culture in the university. The topics of MERD’16 are based on a combination of fundamental researches, advanced research methodologies and application technologies. As the editor-in-chief, we would like to express our gratitude to the editorial board and fellow review members for their tireless effort in compiling and reviewing the selected papers for this proceeding. We would also like to extend our great appreciation to the members of the Publication Committee and Secretariat for their excellent cooperation in preparing the proceeding of MERD’16

Advanced Mobile Robotics: Volume 3

Mobile robotics is a challenging field with great potential. It covers disciplines including electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, cognitive science, and social science. It is essential to the design of automated robots, in combination with artificial intelligence, vision, and sensor technologies. Mobile robots are widely used for surveillance, guidance, transportation and entertainment tasks, as well as medical applications. This Special Issue intends to concentrate on recent developments concerning mobile robots and the research surrounding them to enhance studies on the fundamental problems observed in the robots. Various multidisciplinary approaches and integrative contributions including navigation, learning and adaptation, networked system, biologically inspired robots and cognitive methods are welcome contributions to this Special Issue, both from a research and an application perspective

Decentralised State Feedback Tracking Control for Large-Scale Interconnected Systems Using Sliding Mode Techniques

A class of large-scale interconnected systems with matched and unmatched uncertainties is studied in this thesis, with the objective of proposing a controller based on diffeomorphisms and some techniques to deal with the tracking problem of the system. The main research developed in this thesis includes: 1. Large-scale interconnected system is a complex system consisting of several semi-independent subsystems, which are typically located in distinct geographic or logical locations. In this situation, decentralised control which only collects the local information is the practical method to deal with large-scale interconnected systems. The decentralised methodology is utilised throughout this thesis, guaranteeing that systems exhibit essential robustness against uncertainty. 2. Sliding mode technique is involved in the process of controller design. By introducing a nonsingular local diffeomorphism, the large-scale system can be transformed into a system with a specific regular form, where the matched uncertainty is completely absent from the subspace spanned by the sliding mode dynamics. The sliding mode based controller is proposed in this thesis to successfully achieve high robustness of the closed-loop interconnected systems with some particular uncertainties. 3. The considered large-scale interconnected systems can always track the smooth desired signals in a finite time. Each subsystem can track its own ideal signal or all subsystems can track the same ideal signal. Both situations are discussed in this thesis and the results are mathematically proven by introducing the Lyapunov theory, even when operating under the presence of disturbances. At the end of each chapter, some simulation examples, like a coupled inverted pendulums system, a river pollution system and a high-speed train system, are presented to verify the correctness of the proposed theory. At the conclusion of this thesis, a brief summary of the research findings has been provided, along with a mention of potential future research directions in tracking control of large-scale systems, like more general boundedness of interconnections, possibilities of distributed control, collaboration with intelligent control and so on. Some mathematical theories involved and simulation code are included in the appendix section

Control and supervision of an AGV with energy consumption optimization

Os veículos guiados autónomos (AGVs) ganharam enorme importância e interesse no campo da indústria. Estes são soluções populares para o transporte de bens materiais para diferentes partes das fábricas. No entanto, em muitas fábricas, os armazéns estão localizados à parte da linha de produção ou em edifícios separados, exigindo que o transporte de bens materiais seja feito exteriormente. Os ambientes exteriores representam um desafio particular para os AGVs. Por um lado, estes ambientes causam mais desgaste nos componentes dos veículos e o clima na Europa pode atingir extremos opostos, dependendo da estação do ano e das regiões. Por outro lado, estes ambientes aumentam as preocupações de segurança, uma vez que outros veículos ou peões podem circular no mesmo espaço e ao mesmo tempo. Neste projecto, um rebocador eléctrico XXL será transformado num AGV, que opera em ambiente exterior. Este veículo é responsável pelo transporte de mercadorias do final da linha de produção para o armazém exterior numa fábrica de automóveis. O principal objectivo é assegurar o seu funcionamento contínuo durante um turno de 16 horas, garantindo o mínimo de interrupções para v«carregamento da bateria. Desta forma, nesta dissertação foram abordados dois capítulos distintos: para a análise e estudo do consumo energético foi simulado a powertrain de um veículo eléctrico. Neste, foi considerado um motor de indução cujo método de controlo aplicado foi o Field Oriented Control (FOC). Para além do comportamento eléctrico, também foi simulado o modelo físico da carga, bem como o cálculo da energia eléctrica consumida. Para a navegação, foi estudada uma solução baseada na integração do GPS com o INS. Dadas as restrições temporais, apenas a solução GPS foi testada e a técnica Loosely Coupled foi abordada como uma possível solução de integração.Autonomous guided vehicles (AGVs) have gained enormous importance and interest in the industry field. These are popular solutions for transport of good and material to different parts of the factories. However, in many factories, warehouses are located apart from the factory floor or in separate buildings, requiring the transport of material goods to be done outdoors. Outdoor environments represent a particular challenge for AGVs. On one hand, these environments causes more wear and tear on vehicle components and the weather in Europe can reach opposite extremes depending on the season and regions. On the other hand, these environments increase safety concerns since other vehicles or pedestrians can circulate in the same space at the same time. In this project, an electric tugger XXL will be transformed into an AGV, which operates in outdoor environment. This vehicle is responsible for transporting goods from the end of the production line to the outside warehouse in a car manufacturing plant. The main objective is to ensure its continuous operation during a 16-hour shift, and guarantee the minimum battery charging actions. In this way, in this dissertation two distinct chapters were approached: for the analysis and study of the energy consumption it was simulated the powertrain of an electric vehicle. In this one it was considered an induction motor whose control method applied was the Field Oriented Control (FOC). Besides the electrical behaviour, also the physical model of the load was simulated as well as the calculation of the consumed electrical energy. For navigation, a solution based on the integration of GPS with INS was studied. Given the temporal constraints, only the GPS solution was tested and the loosely coupled technique was approached as a possible integration solution