The Infona portal uses cookies, i.e. strings of text saved by a browser on the user's device. The portal can access those files and use them to remember the user's data, such as their chosen settings (screen view, interface language, etc.), or their login data. By using the Infona portal the user accepts automatic saving and using this information for portal operation purposes. More information on the subject can be found in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. By closing this window the user confirms that they have read the information on cookie usage, and they accept the privacy policy and the way cookies are used by the portal. You can change the cookie settings in your browser.
A modern class of small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles are physically capable of performing exceptional aerobatic maneuvers. This paper presents a methodology for including one of the more functional of these maneuvers, the knife-edge, in motion planning. This is achieved by separating the top-level motion planner from the dynamics and control of the knife-edge maneuver. By coupling feedback...
The goal in this paper is to introduce an intuitive way to control a VTOL vehicle (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) using commands from an user, i.e., the idea is to provide a non cumbersome easy-to-handle interface that will allow even inexpert users a safe command interface for this kind of vehicles. The aerial vehicle chosen for validating this safe-control-scheme is the quadcopter vehicle. The user...
Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) have gained considerable private and commercial interest for a variety of jobs and entertainment in the past 10 years. This paper presents the applications of UAS in transportation and structural engineering with emphasis on bridge inspection. A brief but thorough review of UAS applications for State Department of Transportation in the United States is provided. Potential...
With the goal of a skywriting unmanned aerial vehicle, a proof-of-concept design is presented. Drone swarms act as illuminated pixels for night-time aerial imagery. By contrast, this proof-of-concept employs a single quadcopter for day-time skywriting with smoke. This paper describes hardware and software selection and mounting configuration. A Snellen Chart approach is used to calculate appropriate...
The potential of micro-UAV-based radar imaging is far from being exploited, though radar sensors having budgets compatible with micro-UAV are increasingly available. As a contribution to this topic, this paper discusses the relation between UAV dynamics and navigation, and radar processing, and presents a proof-of-concept ground imaging experiment in which a commercial hexacopter has been equipped...
In this work, we present an autonomous control system to perform aerobatic maneuvers with an agile fixed-wing UAV. The control system is strongly based on the underlying physics of the aircraft, thus allowing simple control techniques to work well through the full range of flight conditions undergone in aerobatic maneuvers. Moreover, this single control system is capable of performing a wide variety...
This paper provides experimental results for dead reckoning of a fixed-wing UAV using a non-linear observer (NLO) and a more recent tool called eXogenous Kalman Filter (XKF), which uses the NLO itself as a first-stage filter. The sensors used are an IMU (accelerometers, inclinometers, and rate gyros), a camera, and an altimeter; the observed states are position, velocity, and attitude. A machine vision...
A formation flight controller can be used in a UAS fleet to avoid collision, reduce fuel consumption, or to execute interactions between the UASs, such as autonomous aerial refueling. In this paper, an autonomous formation flight (AFF) controller based on non linear dynamic inversion (NLDI) and a non-colliding path planner are proposed. The proposed NLDI AFF extends a NLDI controller found in literature...
Fully autonomous landing on moving platforms poses a problem of importance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Current approaches are usually based on tracking and following the moving platform by means of several techniques, which frequently lack performance in real applications. The aim of this paper is to prove a simple landing strategy is able to provide practical results. The presented approach...
One important aspect that needs to be carefully considered in maritime operations using unmanned robotic vehicles is the communication restrictions between the vehicles and the mission controller that arises mainly due to long distances and/or low power transmissions. This paper addresses the problem of maintaining a communication link between a command station and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)...
The recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology permit to develop new usages for them. One of the current challenges is to operate UAVs as an autonomous swarm. In this domain we already proposed a new mobility model using Ant Colony Algorithms combined with chaotic dynamics (CACOC) to enhance the coverage of an area by a swarm of UAVs. In this paper we propose to consider this mobility...
This paper presents an optimization based approach for cooperative multiple UAV attack missions. The objective is to determine the minimum resources required to coordinately attack a target at a given set of directions. We restrict the paths of the munitions to direct Dubins paths to satisfy field of view constraints and to avoid certain undesirable paths. The proposed algorithm derives the feasible...
This paper proposes an adaptive robust tracking control strategy for a quadrotor helicopter with parametric uncertainties and external disturbances based on sliding mode control. The inner loop of the control strategy is concerned about the attitude and altitude control of the quadrotor helicopter, while the outer loop is employed to track the desired horizontal positions. By assuming knowledge of...
This paper presents a novel autonomous take-off and landing approach which uses a discrete-time finite-horizon suboptimal nonlinear control strategy to achieve a smooth landing on specific colored platform. By color-based tracking we can improve the performance of the position landing by correcting the position given by the GPS. The signal of the GPS is not always reliable since the accuracy strongly...
Currently, quadrotors have become very popular and have different applications in entertainment, transportation, rescue and military areas, among others. A key activity in the design of quadrotors is the flight control. A well-known flight controller is the PD, which is sufficient to make the quadcopter to hover in the air. One crucial problem with this type of controllers is the coefficient tuning...
The tilting trirotor presented in this paper is able to perform levelled flight at almost null attitude which is an important requirement for fixed wing tilt rotors in view of the lift control during transition from hovering to forward flight. The nonlinear dynamics, the large effect of wind due to the small scale, and the absence of aerodynamic data at low speed and Reynolds numbers, are crucial...
This paper presents a cooperative navigation technique which exploits relative vision-based sensing and carrier-phase differential GPS (CDGPS) between antennas embarked on different flying platforms, to improve UAV attitude estimation in real time or in post-processing phase. The focus is set on outdoor environments, hence it is assumed that all vehicles are under nominal GPS coverage. The logical...
Set the date range to filter the displayed results. You can set a starting date, ending date or both. You can enter the dates manually or choose them from the calendar.