Modeling and nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system

Autonomous aerial robots have become an essential part of many civilian and military applications. The workspace and agility of these vehicles motivated great research interest resulting in various studies addressing their control architectures and mechanical configurations. Increasing autonomy enabled them to perform tasks such as surveillance, inspection and remote sensing in hazardous and challenging environments. The ongoing research promises further contributions to the society, in both theory and practice. To furthermore extend their vast applications, aerial robots are equipped with the tools to enable physical interaction with the environment. These tasks represent a great challenge due to the technological limitations as well as the lack of sophisticated methods necessary for the control of the system to perform desired operations in an efficient and stable manner. Modeling and control problem of an aerial manipulation is still an open research topic with many studies addressing these issues from different perspectives. This thesis deals with the nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system (AMS). The system consists of a quadrotor equipped with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator. The complete modeling of the system is done using the Euler-Lagrange method. A hierarchical nonlinear control structure which consists of outer and inner control loops has been utilized. Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) is designed for the outer loop where the required command signals are generated to force the quadrotor to move on a reference trajectory in the presence of mass uncertainties and reaction forces coming from the manipulator. For the inner loop, the attitude dynamics of the quadrotor and the joint dynamics of the 2-DOF robotic arm are considered as a fully actuated 5-DOF unified part of the AMS. Nonlinear adaptive control has been utilized for the low-level controller where the changes in inertias have been considered. The proposed controller is tested on a high fidelity AMS model in the presence of uncertainties, wind disturbances and measurement noise, and satisfactory trajectory tracking performance with improved robustness is achieved

Generalizing the Sampling Property of the Q-function for Error Rate Analysis of Cooperative Communication in Fading Channels

This paper extends some approximation methods that are used to identify closed form Bit Error Rate (BER) expressions which are frequently utilized in investigation and comparison of performance for wireless communication systems in the literature. By using this group of approximation methods, some expectation integrals, which are complicated to analyze and have high computational complexity to evaluate through Monte Carlo simulations, are computed. For these integrals, by using the sampling property of the integrand functions of one or more arguments, reliable BER expressions revealing the diversity and coding gains are derived. Although the methods we present are valid for a larger class of integration problems, in this work we show the step by step derivation of the BER expressions for a canonical cooperative communication scenario in addition to a network coded system starting from basic building blocks. The derived expressions agree with the simulation results for a very wide range of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, Submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, ISIT 2013, Istanbul, Turke

EQUALITY - NOW OR NEVER: THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ENVER HOXHA

Students of politics know very well that Plato's perfect city in Republic is a political model of philosophico-pedagogical tyranny. For Ranciere, the political thought ofthe thinker of autocratic hierarchy, namely Plato, has much to do with what Ranciere calls the founding gesture of philosophy. In other words, since Plato, asilent majority has always been excluded from the privilege of thought and art and this has helped the construction of the implicit alliance between philosophy and there pressive order of social hierarchy. According to Ranciere, Marx, Sartre,Althusser and Bourdieu, despite their intellectual standing in the Left, are thinkers of inequality and pedagogical privilege. Each assumes, as Plato does, that the pedagogue must think for and educate those who are unable to think for themselves;only then will society change for the better. Yet, the fundamental gesture of philosophy (and even science) not only provides privileges to intellectuals but also continuously postpones the actual realization of achieving equality. If we take equality as an end rather than a presupposition or an axiomatic point of departureit would only prolong the hierarchy between "those who know" and "those who does not know". In this paper, I plan to examine Enver Hoxha's political thought from a Rancierean perspective. I mainly focus on a major concept which unifies Ranciereian thought, that being "equality"

Development of Rabin’s Choice Coordination Algorithm in Event-B

The paper reports our investigation on tool support for the integration of qualitative probabilistic reasoning into Event-B. In the process, we formalise a non- trivial algorithm, namely Rabin’s choice coordination. Our correctness reasoning is a combination of termination proofs in terms of probabilistic convergence and standard invariant techniques. Moreover, we describe how qualitative probabilistic reasoning can be maintained during refinement

Nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system

This paper presents the nonlinear adaptive control of a quadrotor endowed with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator. By considering the quadrotor and the robot arm as a combined system, complete modeling of the aerial manipulation system (AMS) has been presented using the Euler-Lagrange method. A hierarchical nonlinear control scheme which consists of outer and inner control loops has been utilized. Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) is designed for the outer loop where the required command signals are generated to force the quadrotor to move on a reference trajectory in the presence of uncertainties and reaction forces coming from the manipulator. For the inner loop, the attitude dynamics of the quadrotor and the dynamics of the 2-DOF robotic arm are considered as a fully actuated 5-DOF unified part of the AMS. Nonlinear adaptive control has been utilized for the low-level controller where the changes in inertias and the masses have been tackled along with the reaction forces acting on the attitude part of the AMS. The proposed technique has been validated through simulations in two different scenarios