Towards MAV Autonomous Flight: A Modeling and Control Approach

This thesis is about modeling and control of miniature rotary-wing flying vehicles, with a special emphasis on quadrotor and coaxial systems. Mathematical models for simulation and nonlinear control approaches are introduced and subsequently applied to commercial aircrafts: the DraganFlyer and the Hummingbird quadrotors, which have been hardware-modified in order to perform experimental autonomous flying. Furthermore, a first-ever approach for modeling commercial micro coaxial mechanism is presented using a flying-toy called the Micro-mosquito

Miniature Quad-rotor Dynamics Modeling & Guidance for Vision-based Target Tracking Control Tasks

This paper presents the dynamics modeling and the control & guidance architecture for specific target tracking indoors tasks using a miniature quad-rotor. Our objective is to develop a testbed using Matlab for experimentation and simulation of dynamics, control and guidance methods within a strong interplay between the hardware on board and software provisioned

TG2M: Trajectory Generator and Guidance Module for the Aerial Vehicle Control Language AVCL

This paper presents a novel framework for high-level complex mission planning – AVCL and its built-in trajectory generator module – TG 2 M. For the mission planning we present a language capable of describing the missions and capabilities of a heterogeneous group of vehicles, which includes its interpreter, a definition of a base-vehicle, and a Mission Planner (MP) that uses GIS as the data-model for the world. This MP is not tied to a particular set of vehicles, sensors or commands, which means that at any given time new functionality can be loaded and displayed to the human operator as new options and commands, allowing to control and display N mission at the same time. In addition for low-level mission guidance, the TG 2 M addresses the feature of generating complex trajectories within mission-specific constraints, improving the typical civil system which use basic trajectory-generation algorithms, capable only of linear waypoint navigation, with little or non-existent control over the trajectory. Final experiments will test the TG 2 M mathematical framework for trajectory generation showing the AVCL capabilities for the mission planning and control of the UAV

Virtual-work-based optimization design on compliant transmission mechanism for flapping-wing aerial vehicles

This paper presents a method for analyzing and optimizing the design of a compliant transmission mechanism for a flapping-wing aerial vehicle. Its purpose is of minimizing the peak input torque required from a driving motor. In order to maintain the stability of flight, minimizing the peak input torque is necessary. To this purpose, first, a pseudo-rigid-body model was built and a kinematic analysis of the model was carried out. Next, the aerodynamic torque generated by flapping wings was calculated. Then, the input torque required to keep the flight of the vehicle was solved by using the principle of virtual work. The values of the primary attributes at compliant joints (i.e., the torsional stiffness of virtual spring and the initial neutral angular position) were optimized. By comparing to a full rigid-body mechanism, the compliant transmission mechanism with well-optimized parameters can reduce the peak input torque up to 66.0%

Biomechanics of smart wings in a bat robot: morphing wings using SMA actuators

This paper presents the design of a bat-like micro aerial vehicle with actuated morphing wings. NiTi shape memory alloys (SMAs) acting as artificial biceps and triceps muscles are used for mimicking the morphing wing mechanism of the bat flight apparatus. Our objective is twofold. Firstly, we have implemented a control architecture that allows an accurate and fast SMA actuation. This control makes use of the electrical resistance measurements of SMAs to adjust morphing wing motions. Secondly, the feasibility of using SMA actuation technology is evaluated for the application at hand. To this purpose, experiments are conducted to analyze the control performance in terms of nominal and overloaded operation modes of the SMAs. This analysis includes: (i) inertial forces regarding the stretchable wing membrane and aerodynamic loads, and (ii) uncertainties due to impact of airflow conditions over the resistance–motion relationship of SMAs. With the proposed control, morphing actuation speed can be increased up to 2.5 Hz, being sufficient to generate lift forces at a cruising speed of 5ms−1

Follow-the-leader Formation Marching Through a Scalable O(log2n) Parallel Architecture.

An important topic in the field of Multi Robot Systems focuses on motion coordination and synchronization for formation keeping. Although several works have addressed such problem, little attention has been devoted to study the computational complexity within the framework of large-scale systems. This paper presents our current work on how to achieve high computational performance for systems composed by a large number of robots that must fulfill with a marching and formation task. A scalable Multi-Processor Parallel Architecture is introduced with the purpose of achieving scalability, i.e., computation time of O(log2n) for a n-robots system. Our architecture has been tested onto a multi-processor system and validated against several simulations testing

Nonlinear Control of Underactuated Systems using a 3-D Virtual Laboratory

Control of underactuated mechanical systems is currently one of the most active fields in research due to the diverse applications of these systems in real-life. The aim of this article is focused on the application of nonlinear control techniques for underactuated systems and the virtual simulation of their dynamics behavior. The main contribution of this research is related with the applications of balancing controllers designed with linearization techniques, and including swing-up control using energy based methods for two of the most typical underactuated systems used for testing nonlinear control: The cart-pole and the rotating pendulum systems. The second contribution relies in the development of a virtual laboratory for testing this algorithms and also with a great feature included; the platform is not tied to specific embedded controllers, the users can proof their own control techniques, adding control equations using a graphical user interface developed for that purpose. Finally, the analytical results will be validated via numerical solutions implemented on Matlab-Simulink toolbox, comparing the controllers and the simulation capabilities through several test cases

Rotary-wing MAV Modeling & Control for indoor scenarios

This paper is about modeling and control of Miniature Aerial Vehicles ¿MAVs for indoor scenarios, specially using, micro coaxial and quadrotor systems. Mathematical models for simulation and control are introduced and subsequently applied to the commercial aircraft: the DraganFlyer quadrotor and the Micro-Mosquito coaxial flying vehicle. The MAVs have been hardware-modified in order to perform experimental autonomous flight. A novel approach for control based on Hybrid Backstepping and the Frenet-Serret theory is used for attitude stabilization (Backstepping+FST), introducing a desired attitude angle acceleration function dependent on aircraft velocity. Results of autonomous hovering and tracking are presented based on the scheme we propose for control and attitude stabilization when MAV is maneuvering at moderate speeds

Mini-quadrotor Attitude Control based on Hybrid Backstepping & Frenet-Serret Theory

This paper is about modeling and control of miniature quadrotors, with a special emphasis on attitude control. Mathematical models for simulation and nonlinear control approaches are introduced and subsequently applied to commercial aircraft: the DraganFlyer quadrotor, which has been hardware-modified in order to perform experimental autonomous flying. Hybrid Backstepping control and the Frenet-Serret theory is used for attitude stabilization, introducing a desired attitude angle acceleration function dependent on aircraft velocity. Finally, improvements on disturbance rejection and attitude tracking at moderate aircraft speeds are validated through various simulation scenarios (indoor navigation based on camera tracking), and flight experiments conducted on the DraganFlyer quadroto

Fish physiology put into practice: A robotic fish model

Underwater creatures are capable of high performance movements in water. Thus, underwaterrobot design based on the mechanism of fish locomotion appears to be a promising approach.Over the past few years, researches have been developing underwater robots based on underwatercreatures swimming mechanism