This paper presents an approach for deploying and maintaining a fleet of homogeneous fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for all-time coverage of an area. Two approaches for loiter circle packing have been presented: square and hexagon packing, and the benefits of hexagon packing for minimizing the number of deployed UAVs have been shown. Based on the number of UAVs available and the desired loitering altitude, the proposed algorithm solves an optimization problem to calculate the centres of the loitering circles and the loitering radius for that altitude. The algorithm also incorporates fault recovery capacity in case of simultaneous multiple UAV failures. These failures could form clusters of survivor (active) UAVs over the area with no overall survivor information. The algorithm deploys a super-agent with a larger communication capacity at a higher altitude to recover from the failure. The super-agent collects the information of survivors, and updates the homogeneous radius and the locations of the loitering circles at the same altitude to restore the full coverage. The individual survivor UAVs are then informed and transit to the new loitering circles using Dubin's paths. The relationship with the extent of recoverable loss fractions of the deployed UAVs have been analysed for varying the initial loiter radii. Simulation results have been presented to demonstrate the applicability of the approach and compare the two presented packing approaches.
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear coupling between the large angle flapping motion and the quasi-steady aerodynamics. Then, it is transformed into a feedback control system according to the framework of imitation learning. In particular, an additional constraint is incorporated through the learning process to enhance the stability properties of the resulting controlled dynamics. Compared wit…
PRO-SPECT: Probabilistically Safe Scalable Planning for Energy-Aware Coordinated UAV-UGV Teams in Stochastic Environments
Khoury Department of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University（东北大学Khoury计算机科学系）；The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.（查尔斯·斯塔克·德雷珀实验室公司）；Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University（东北大学机械与工业工程系）；Departments of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University（东北大学机械与工业工程系和电气与计算机工程系）
Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) is a technology that is almost four decades old and it was developed solely for the purpose of developing and enhancing the impact of neuroprosthetics. However, in the recent times, with the commercialization of non-invasive electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets, the technology has seen a wide variety of applications like home automation, wheelchair control, vehicle steering etc. One of the latest developed applications is the mind-controlled quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle. These applications, how- ever, do not require a very high-speed response and give satis…
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
As off-the-shelf (OTS) autopilots become more widely available and user-friendly and the drone market expands, safer, more efficient, and more complex motion planning and control will become necessary for fixed-wing aerial robotic platforms. Considering typical low-level attitude stabilization available on OTS flight controllers, this paper first develops an approach for modeling and identification of the control augmented dynamics for a small fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). A high-level Nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (NMPC) is subsequently formulated for simultaneous airspeed…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；NASA Ames Research Center（美国国家航空航天局艾姆斯研究中心）
With the number of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) in the national airspace projected to increase in the next few years, there is growing interest in a traffic management system capable of handling the demands of this aviation sector. It is expected that such a system will involve trajectory prediction, uncertainty propagation, and path planning algorithms. In this work, we use linear covariance propagation in combination with a quadratic programming-based collision detection algorithm to rapidly validate declared flight plans. Additionally, these algorithms are combined with a Dynamic,…
Design and Aerodynamic Modeling of MetaMorpher: A Hybrid Rotary andFixed-Wing Morphing UAV
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, LARICS Laboratory for Robotics and Intelligent Control Systems（萨格勒布大学电气工程与计算学院LARICS机器人智能控制系统实验室）
Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院自主系统实验室）
This paper proposes a computationally efficient method to estimate the time-varying relative pose between two visual-inertial sensor rigs mounted on the flexible wings of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The estimated relative poses are used to generate highly accurate depth maps in real-time and can be employed for obstacle avoidance in low-altitude flights or landing maneuvers. The approach is structured as follows: Initially, a wing model is identified by fitting a probability density function to measured deviations from the nominal relative baseline transformation. At run-time, …
Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；The University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学）；Wageningen University and Research（瓦赫宁根大学及研究中心）
Drones have shown to be useful aerial vehicles for unmanned transport missions such as food and medical supply delivery. This can be leveraged to deliver life-saving nutrition and medicine for people in emergency situations. However, commercial drones can generally only carry 10 % - 30 % of their own mass as payload, which limits the amount of food delivery in a single flight. One novel solution to noticeably increase the food-carrying ratio of a drone, is recreating some structures of a drone, such as the wings, with edible materials. We thus propose a drone, which is no longer only a food tr…
Slot-hopping Enabled Loiter Guidance and Automation for Fixed-wing UAV Corridors
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.（美国航空航天学会）；Department of Mechatronics Engineering（机械电子工程系）；Department of Aerospace Engineering（航空航天工程系）
Unmanned aerial vehicles have been demonstrated successfully in a variety of tasks, including surveying and sampling tasks over large areas. These vehicles can take many forms. Quadrotors' agility and ability to hover makes them well suited for navigating potentially tight spaces, while fixed wing aircraft are capable of efficient flight over long distances. Hybrid aerial vehicles (HAVs) attempt to achieve both of these benefits by exhibiting multiple modes; however, morphing HAVs typically require extra actuators which add mass, reducing both agility and efficiency. We propose a morphing HAV …
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich)（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Small, low-speed fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating autonomously, beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) will inevitably encounter winds rising to levels near or exceeding the vehicles' nominal airspeed. In this paper, we develop a nonlinear lateral-directional path following guidance law with explicit consideration of online wind estimates. Energy efficient airspeed reference compensation logic is developed for excess wind scenarios (i.e. when the wind speed rises above the airspeed), enabling either mitigation, prevention, or over-powering of excess wind induced run-away from …
Loiter UAV Reinsertion Guidance for Fixed-wing UAV Corridors
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.（美国航空航天学会）；Department of Mechatronics Engineering（机电工程系）；Department of Aerospace Engineering（航空航天工程系）
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）
We present a closed-loop control strategy for a delta-wing unmanned aerial aquatic-vehicle (UAAV) that enables autonomous swim, fly, and water-to-air transition. Our control system consists of a hybrid state estimator and a closed-loop feedback policy which is capable of trajectory following through the water, air and transition domains. To test our estimator and control approach in hardware, we instrument the vehicle with a minimalistic set of commercial off-the-shelf sensors. Finally, we demonstrate a successful autonomous water-to-air transition with our prototype UAAV system and discuss th…
This paper presents a distributed approach to provide persistent coverage of an arbitrarily shaped area using heterogeneous coverage of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and to recover from simultaneous failures of multiple UAVs. The proposed approach discusses level-homogeneous deployment and maintenance of a homogeneous fleet of fixed-wing UAVs given the boundary information and the minimum loitering radius. The UAVs are deployed at different altitude levels to provide heterogeneous coverage and sensing. We use an efficient square packing method to deploy the UAVs, given the minimu…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with on-board cameras are widely used for remote surveillance and video capturing applications. In remote virtual reality (VR) applications, multiple UAVs can be used to capture different partially overlapping angles of the ground target, which can be stitched together to provide 360° views. This requires coordinated formation of UAVs that is adaptive to movements of the ground target. In this paper, we propose a joint UAV formation and tracking framework to capture 360° angles of the target. The proposed framework uses a zero touch approach for automated and ad…
A highly maneuverable flying squirrel drone with agility-improving foldable wings
Department of Convergence IT Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH)（融合IT工程系，浦项科学技术大学）；Defence AI Center, Agency for Defense Development(ADD)（国防人工智能中心，国防开发机构）
University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；Universidad Complutense de Madrid（马德里康普顿斯大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
It is essential in many applications to impose a scalable coordinated motion control on a large group of mobile robots, which is efficient in tasks requiring repetitive execution, such as environmental monitoring. In this paper, we design a guiding vector field to guide multiple robots to follow possibly different desired paths while coordinating their motions. The vector field uses a path parameter as a virtual coordinate that is communicated among neighboring robots. Then, the virtual coordinate is utilized to control the relative parametric displacement between robots along the paths. This …
Recent technological advancements in small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have led to the development of companion UAVs. Similar to conventional companion robots, companion UAVs have the potential to assist us in our daily lives and to help alleviating social loneliness issue. In contrast to ground companion robots, companion UAVs have the capability to fly and possess unique interaction characteristics. Our goals in this work are to have a bird's-eye view of the companion UAV works and to identify lessons learned and guidelines for the design of companion UAVs. We tackle two major chal…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；University of South Carolina（南卡罗来纳大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
We study the problem of covering an environment using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with limited battery capacity. We consider a scenario where the UAV can land on an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) and recharge the onboard battery. The UGV can also recharge the UAV while transporting the UAV to the next take-off site. We present an algorithm to solve a new variant of the area coverage problem that takes into account this symbiotic UAV and UGV system. The input consists of a set of boustrophedon cells -- rectangular strips whose width is equal to the field-of-view of the sensor on the UAV. Th…
Collaborative target-tracking control using multiple autonomous fixed-wing UAVs with constant speeds
Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学电子工程系）；Universidad Complutense de Madrid（马德里complutense大学）；Research School of Electrical, Energy and Material Engineering, Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学电气、能源和材料工程研究学校）；Optus-Curtin Centre of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, Curtin University（Curtin大学人工智能卓越中心）
Autonomous Systems Lab ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院自主系统实验室）
L1 guidance logic is one of the most widely used path following controllers for small fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), primarily due to its simplicity (low-cost implementation on embedded on-board processors, e.g. micro-controllers) and ability to track both circles and lines, which make up the vast majority of a typical fixed-wing vehicle's flight plan. The logic was later extended for speed independent dynamic similarity with an adaptive L1 distance, a formulation currently used on common open-source autopilot platforms. Two primary drawbacks remain, specific to small, slow flying…
ZS-Puffin: Design, Modeling and Implementation of an Unmanned Aerial-Aquatic Vehicle with Amphibious Wings
School of Ocean Engineering and Technology, Sun Yat‐sen University（海洋工程与技术学院，中山大学）；Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory（广东海洋工程科学实验室）；Key Laboratory of Comprehensive Observation of Polar Environment (Sun Yat‐sen University)（极地环境综合观测重点实验室（中山大学））；Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Technology for Deep Water Acoustics（广东省深水声学信息技术重点实验室）
SINTEF Digital（挪威科技工业研究院数字研究所）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Contemporary autopilot systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are far more limited in their flight envelope as compared to experienced human pilots, thereby restricting the conditions UAVs can operate in and the types of missions they can accomplish autonomously. This paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) controller to handle the nonlinear attitude control problem, enabling extended flight envelopes for fixed-wing UAVs. A proof-of-concept controller using the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is developed, and is shown to be capable of stabilizing a fixed-wing UAV …
This paper proposes a novel control law for accurate tracking of agile trajectories using a tailsitter flying wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that transitions between vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and forward flight. The global control formulation enables maneuvering throughout the flight envelope, including uncoordinated flight with sideslip. Differential flatness of the nonlinear tailsitter dynamics with a simplified aerodynamics model is shown. Using the flatness transform, the proposed controller incorporates tracking of the position reference along with its derivatives velocity,…
Fighting wildfires is a precarious task, imperiling the lives of engaging firefighters and those who reside in the fire's path. Firefighters need online and dynamic observation of the firefront to anticipate a wildfire's unknown characteristics, such as size, scale, and propagation velocity, and to plan accordingly. In this paper, we propose a distributed control framework to coordinate a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a human-centered active sensing of wildfires. We develop a dual-criterion objective function based on Kalman uncertainty residual propagation and weighted multi-age…
Huawei Turkey R&D Center（华为土耳其研发中心）；Istanbul University – Cerrahpasa（伊斯坦布尔大学-塞拉赫帕萨分校）
In this paper, a combat Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) is modeled in the simulation environment. The rotary wing UAV is successfully performed various tasks such as locking on the targets, tracking, and sharing the relevant data with surrounding vehicles. Different software technologies such as API communication, ground control station configuration, autonomous movement algorithms, computer vision, and deep learning are employed.
Connectivity between ground vehicles can be utilized and expanded to include aerial vehicles for coordinated missions. Using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication technologies, a communication link can be established between Connected and Autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs). Hardware implementation and testing of a ground to air communication link is crucial for real-life applications. Two different communication links were established, Dedicated Short Range communication (DSRC) and 4G internet based WebSocket communication. Both links were tested separately both…
Micro unmanned aerial vehicles (mUAV) became very common in recent years. As a result of their widespread usage, when they are flown by hobbyists illegally, crucial risks are imposed and such mUAVs need to be sensed by security systems. Furthermore, the sensing of mUAVs are essential for also swarm robotics research where the individuals in a flock of robots require systems to sense and localize each other for coordinated operation. In order to obtain such systems, there are studies to detect mUAVs utilizing different sensing mediums, such as vision, infrared and sound signals, and small-scale…
The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool to produce more and more complex and aesthetic camera shots. However, the shooting process currently rely on manual control of the drones which makes it difficult and sometimes inconvenient to work with. In this paper we address the lack of autonomous system to operate generic rotary-wing drones for shooting purposes. We propose a global control architecture based on a high-level generic API used by many UAV. Our solution integrates a compound and coupled model of a generic rotary-wing drone and a Full State Feedback stra…
Coordinated Autonomous Drones for Human-Centered Fire Evacuation in Partially Observable Urban Environments
Mechanical Engineering University of California, Berkeley（机械工程 加州大学伯克利分校）；Computer Sciences University of California, Berkeley（计算机科学 加州大学伯克利分校）；Computer Engineering Johns Hopkins University（计算机工程 约翰霍普金斯大学）
Polytechnic University of Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Boeing Research & Technology Europe（波音欧洲研究与技术公司）；National University of Distance Education（国立远程教育大学）；Center for Automation and Robotics (UPM-CSIC)（自动化与机器人中心（UPM-CSIC））
This article proposes an inertial navigation algorithm intended to lower the negative consequences of the absence of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) signals on the navigation of autonomous fixed wing low SWaP (Size, Weight, and Power) UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles). In addition to accelerometers and gyroscopes, the filter takes advantage of sensors usually present onboard these platforms, such as magnetometers, Pitot tube, and air vanes, and aims to minimize the attitude error and reduce the position drift (both horizontal and vertical) with the dual objective of improving the aircraft…
Polytechnic University of Madrid（马德里理工大学）；Boeing Research & Technology Europe (BR&TE)（波音欧洲研究与技术部）
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) inertial navigation exhibits an extreme dependency on the availability of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals, without which it incurs in a slow but unavoidable position drift that may ultimately lead to the loss of the platform if the GNSS signals are not restored or the aircraft does not reach a location from which it can be recovered by remote control. This article describes an stochastic high fidelity simulation of the flight of a fixed wing low SWaP (size, weight, and power) autonomous UAV in turbulent and varying weather intended to…
