The main objective of this work is demonstrated through two main aspects. The first is the design of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) controller to develop the attitude and altitude of a quadcopter. The second is to establish the linearized mathematical model of the quadcopter in a simple and clear way. To show the effectiveness of the ANFIS approach, the performance of a well-trained ANFIS controller is compared to a classical proportional-derivative (PD) controller and a properly tuned fuzzy logic controller.
Electrical and Electronics Engineering Institute, College of Engineering, University of the Philippines（菲律宾大学工程学院电气与电子工程研究所）
To properly simulate and implement a quadcopter flight control for intended load and flight conditions, the quadcopter model must have parameters on various relationships including propeller thrust-torque, thrust-PWM, and thrust--angular speed to a certain level of accuracy. Thrust-torque modeling requires an expensive reaction torque measurement sensor. In the absence of sophisticated equipment, the study comes up with alternative methods to complete the quadcopter model. The study also presents a method of modeling the rotational aerodynamic drag on the quadcopter. Although the resulting mod…
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
Quadcopters are increasingly used for applications ranging from hobby to industrial products and services. This paper serves as a tutorial on the design, simulation, implementation, and experimental outdoor testing of digital quadcopter flight controllers, including Explicit Model Predictive Control, Linear Quadratic Regulator, and Proportional Integral Derivative. A quadcopter was flown in an outdoor testing facility and made to track an inclined, circular path at different tangential velocities under ambient wind conditions. Controller performance was evaluated via multiple metrics, such as …
An autonomous drone flying near obstacles needs to be able to detect and avoid the obstacles or it will collide with them. In prior work, drones can detect and avoid walls using data from camera, ultrasonic or laser sensors mounted either on the drone or in the environment. It is not always possible to instrument the environment, and sensors added to the drone consume payload and power - both of which are constrained for drones. This paper studies how data mining classification techniques can be used to predict where an obstacle is in relation to the drone based only on monitoring air-disturba…
Traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS) are used in order to avoid incidences of mid-air collisions between aircraft. We present a game-theoretic approach of a TCAS designed for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A variant of the canonical example of game-theoretic learning, fictitious play, is used as a coordination mechanism between the UAVs, that should choose between the alternative altitudes to fly and avoid collision. We present the implementation results of the proposed coordination mechanism in two quad-copters flying in opposite directions.
University of Cincinnati（辛辛那提大学）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
In this paper, we present an autonomous flight controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This UAV falls in the category of multirotors with tilt-motion enabled rotors. Since the vehicle considered is over-actuated in nature, the dynamics and control allocation have to be analysed carefully. Moreover, the possibility of hovering at large attitude maneuvers of this novel vehicle requires singularity-free attitude control. Hence, quaternion state feedback is utilized to compute the control commands for the UAV motors while avoiding the gimbal lock condition experienced by Eu…
Mila - Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Université de Montréal（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所，蒙特利尔大学）；Alternova Tech SAS（Alternova科技公司）；Universidad Autónoma de Occidente（西部自治大学）
Autonomous landing is a capability that is essential to achieve the full potential of multi-rotor drones in many social and industrial applications. The implementation and testing of this capability on physical platforms is risky and resource-intensive; hence, in order to ensure both a sound design process and a safe deployment, simulations are required before implementing a physical prototype. This paper presents the development of a monocular visual system, using a software-in-the-loop methodology, that autonomously and efficiently lands a quadcopter drone on a predefined landing pad, thus r…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；University of Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）
Nano quadcopters are ideal for gas source localization (GSL) as they are safe, agile and inexpensive. However, their extremely restricted sensors and computational resources make GSL a daunting challenge. In this work, we propose a novel bug algorithm named `Sniffy Bug', which allows a fully autonomous swarm of gas-seeking nano quadcopters to localize a gas source in an unknown, cluttered and GPS-denied environments. The computationally efficient, mapless algorithm foresees in the avoidance of obstacles and other swarm members, while pursuing desired waypoints. The waypoints are first set for …
This paper explains the integration process of an autonomous quadcopter platform and the design of Arduino based novel software architecture that enables the execution of advanced control laws on low-cost off-the-shelf products based frameworks. Here, quadcopter dynamics are explored through the classical nonlinear equations of motion. Next, quadcopter is designed, built and assembled using off-the-shelf, low-cost products to carry a camera payload which is mainly utilized for any type of surveillance missions. System identification of the quadcopter dynamics is accomplished through the use of…
In this paper, we present a novel developmental reinforcement learning-based controller for a quadcopter with thrust vectoring capabilities. This multirotor UAV design has tilt-enabled rotors. It utilizes the rotor force magnitude and direction to achieve the desired state during flight. The control policy of this robot is learned using the policy transfer from the learned controller of the quadcopter (comparatively simple UAV design without thrust vectoring). This approach allows learning a control policy for systems with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The performance of the learned po…
Autonomous Navigation of Cloud-Controlled Quadcopters in Confined Spaces Using Multi-Modal Perception and LLM-Driven High Semantic Reasoning
Department of Mechanical Engineering（机械工程系）；Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology（拉贾沙希工程与技术大学）；Department of Industrial and Production Engineering（工业与生产工程系）；Shahjalal University of Science and Technology（沙赫jalal科学与技术大学）；Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology（孟加拉工程与技术大学）；Department of Urban and Regional Planning（城市与区域规划系）；Department of Computer Science Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；United International University（联合国际大学）
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Robotics at Google（谷歌机器人部门）
We present fully autonomous source seeking onboard a highly constrained nano quadcopter, by contributing application-specific system and observation feature design to enable inference of a deep-RL policy onboard a nano quadcopter. Our deep-RL algorithm finds a high-performance solution to a challenging problem, even in presence of high noise levels and generalizes across real and simulation environments with different obstacle configurations. We verify our approach with simulation and in-field testing on a Bitcraze CrazyFlie using only the cheap and ubiquitous Cortex-M4 microcontroller unit. T…
While autonomous multirotor micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are uniquely well suited for certain types of missions benefiting from stationary flight capabilities, their more widespread usage still faces many hurdles, due in particular to their limited range and the difficulty of fully automating their deployment and retrieval. In this paper we address these issues by solving the problem of the automated landing of a quadcopter on a ground vehicle moving at relatively high speed. We present our system architecture, including the structure of our Kalman filter for the estimation of the relative pos…
University of Technology, Baghdad（巴格达技术大学）；University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；Google（谷歌）
A physical selfie stick extends the user's reach, enabling the acquisition of personal photos that include more of the background scene. Similarly, a quadcopter can capture photos from vantage points unattainable by the user; but teleoperating a quadcopter to good viewpoints is a difficult task. This paper presents a natural interface for quadcopter photography, the SelfieDroneStick that allows the user to guide the quadcopter to the optimal vantage point based on the phone's sensors. Users specify the composition of their desired long-range selfies using their smartphone, and the quadcopter a…
Planar-Sector LOS Guidance for Interception of Agile Targets with Lifting-Wing Quadcopters
School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学自动化科学与电气工程学院）；Research and Development Department, China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology（中国运载火箭技术研究院研发部）
A Learning-based Quadcopter Controller with Extreme Adaptation
High Performance Robotics Lab, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, UC Berkeley（伯克利大学高性能机器人实验室，机械工程系）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley（伯克利大学电子工程与计算机科学系）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（向量人工智能研究所）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Robotic simulators are crucial for academic research and education as well as the development of safety-critical applications. Reinforcement learning environments -- simple simulations coupled with a problem specification in the form of a reward function -- are also important to standardize the development (and benchmarking) of learning algorithms. Yet, full-scale simulators typically lack portability and parallelizability. Vice versa, many reinforcement learning environments trade-off realism for high sample throughputs in toy-like problems. While public data sets have greatly benefited deep …
Automation and Control Institute (ACIN), TU Wien（维也纳工业大学自动化与控制研究所）；Center for Vision, Automation and Control, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所视觉、自动化与控制中心）；Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool（利物浦大学计算机科学系）
This paper presents a two-step algorithm for online trajectory planning in indoor environments with unknown obstacles. In the first step, sampling-based path planning techniques such as the optimal Rapidly exploring Random Tree (RRT*) algorithm and the Line-of-Sight (LOS) algorithm are employed to generate a collision-free path consisting of multiple waypoints. Then, in the second step, constrained quadratic programming is utilized to compute a smooth trajectory that passes through all computed waypoints. The main contribution of this work is the development of a flexible trajectory planning f…
This paper presents a new framework to use images as the inputs for the controller to have autonomous flight, considering the noisy indoor environment and uncertainties. A new Proportional-Integral-Derivative-Accelerated (PIDA) control with a derivative filter is proposed to improves drone/quadcopter flight stability within a noisy environment and enables autonomous flight using object and depth detection techniques. The mathematical model is derived from an accurate model with a high level of fidelity by addressing the problems of non-linearity, uncertainties, and coupling. The proposed PIDA …
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Due to their superior energy efficiency, blimps may replace quadcopters for long-duration aerial tasks. However, designing a controller for blimps to handle complex dynamics, modeling errors, and disturbances remains an unsolved challenge. One recent work combines reinforcement learning (RL) and a PID controller to address this challenge and demonstrates its effectiveness in real-world experiments. In the current work, we build on that using an H-infinity robust controller to expand the stability margin and improve the RL agent's performance. Empirical analysis of different mixing methods reve…
TraQuad is an autonomous tracking quadcopter capable of tracking any moving (or static) object like cars, humans, other drones or any other object on-the-go. This article describes the applications and advantages of TraQuad and the reduction in cost (to about 250$) that has been achieved so far using the hardware and software capabilities and our custom algorithms wherever needed. This description is backed by strong data and the research analyses which have been drawn out of extant information or conducted on own when necessary. This also describes the development of completely autonomous (ev…
Swift Navigation（Swift Navigation公司）；Xona Space Systems（Xona空间系统公司）
This paper surveys a number of recent developments in modern Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and investigates the possible impact on autonomous driving architectures. Modern GNSS now consist of four independent global satellite constellations delivering modernized signals at multiple civil frequencies. New ground monitoring infrastructure, mathematical models, and internet services correct for errors in the GNSS signals at continent scale. Mass-market automotive-grade receiver chipsets are available at low Cost, Size, Weight, and Power (CSWaP). The result is that GNSS in 2020 delive…
Missouri University of Science and Technology（密苏里科技大学）
Mobile and slow moving operations, such as striping, sweeping, bridge flushing and pothole patching, are critical for efficient and safe operation of the highway transportation system. A successfully implemented leader follower autonomous truck mounted attenuators system will eliminate all injuries to DOT employees in follow truck provided appropriate Statutory authority. The leader follower system design imposes more requirements to the lead truck drivers in order to ensure a safe and smooth system operation. The driver is now required to make driving decisions not only from the lead truck's …
Development of an Autonomous Sanding Robot with Structured-Light Technology
CUHK T Stone Robotics Institute（CUHK T Stone机器人研究所）；Innovation and Technology Commission of Hong Kong（香港创新及科技委员会）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Pioneers of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promised to revolutionize the driving experience and driving safety. However, milestones in AVs have materialized slower than forecast. Two culprits are (1) the lack of verifiability of proposed state-of-the-art AV components, and (2) stagnation of pursuing next-level evaluations, e.g., vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and multi-agent collaboration. In part, progress has been hampered by: the large volume of software in AVs, the multiple disparate conventions, the difficulty of testing across datasets and simulators, and the inflexibility of state-of-the-ar…
Performing rescuing and surveillance operations with autonomous ground and aerial vehicles become more and more apparent task. Involving unmanned robot systems allows making these operations more efficient, safe and reliable especially in hazardous areas. This work is devoted to the development of a cost-efficient micro aerial vehicle in a quadrocopter shape for developmental purposes within indoor scenarios. It has been constructed with off-the-shelf components available for mini helicopters. Additional sensors and electronics are incorporated into this aerial vehicle to stabilize its flight …
Autonomous Exploration Development Environment is an open-source repository released to facilitate the development of high-level planning algorithms and integration of complete autonomous navigation systems. The repository contains representative simulation environment models, fundamental navigation modules, e.g., local planner, terrain traversability analysis, waypoint following, and visualization tools. Together with two of our high-level planner releases -- TARE planner for exploration and FAR planner for route planning, we detail usage of the three open-source repositories and share experi…
Our autonomous driving simulation lab produces a high-precision 3D model simulating the parking lot. However, the current model still has poor rendering quality in some aspects. In this work, we develop a system to improve the rendering of the model and evaluate the quality of the rendered model.
Autonomous vehicles are the culmination of advances in many areas such as sensor technologies, artificial intelligence (AI), networking, and more. This paper will introduce the reader to the technologies that build autonomous vehicles. It will focus on open-source tools and libraries for autonomous vehicle development, making it cheaper and easier for developers and researchers to participate in the field. The topics covered are as follows. First, we will discuss the sensors used in autonomous vehicles and summarize their performance in different environments, costs, and unique features. Then …
Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences（东瑞士应用科学大学）；University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons（格劳宾登应用科学大学）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞-瓦特大学）
In this paper, we present an iterative development process for a functional model of an autonomous, location-orienting rollator. An interdisciplinary team was involved in the development, working closely with the end-users. This example shows that the design thinking method is suitable for the development of frontier technology devices in the care sector.
The DevSafeOps Dilemma: A Systematic Literature Review on Rapidity in Safe Autonomous Driving Development and Operation
Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Computer Science（查尔姆斯理工大学计算机科学系）；University of Gothenburg, Department of Computer Science（哥德堡大学计算机科学系）
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
This concept paper outlines some recent efforts toward the design and development of user-integrated semi-autonomous home-sized lawn mowing systems from a systems engineering perspective. This is an important and emerging field of study within the robotics and systems engineering communities. The work presented includes a review of current progress on this problem, a discussion of the problem from a systems engineering perspective, a general system architecture developed by the authors, and a preliminary set of design requirements. This work is meant to provide a baseline and motivation for th…
Road accidents are estimated to be the ninth leading cause of death across all age groups globally. 1.25 million people die annually from road accidents and Africa has the highest rate of road fatalities [1]. Research shows that three out of five road accidents are caused by driver-related behavioral factors [2]. Self-driving technology has the potential of saving lives lost to these preventable road accidents. Africa accounts for the majority of road fatalities and as such would benefit immensely from this technology. However, financial constraints prevent viable experimentation and research …
EDGAR: An Autonomous Driving Research Platform -- From Feature Development to Real-World Application
School of Engineering and Design, Department of Mobility Systems Engineering, Institute of Automotive Technology and Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（工程与设计学院，移动系统工程系，汽车技术研究所及慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所（MIRMI））
PerceptIn Inc.（PerceptIn公司）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）
PerceptIn develops and commercializes autonomous vehicles for micromobility around the globe. This paper makes a holistic summary of PerceptIn's development and operating experiences. This paper provides the business tale behind our product, and presents the development of the computing system for our vehicles. We illustrate the design decision made for the computing system, and show the advantage of offloading localization workloads onto an FPGA platform.
Autonomous Driving Small-Scale Cars: A Survey of Recent Development
Chair of Econometrics and Statistics, esp. in the Transport Sector, Technische Universität Dresden（经济计量学与统计学教授席位（侧重交通领域））；Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig（可扩展数据分析与人工智能中心（ScaDS.AI）德累斯顿/莱比锡）；Barkhausen Institut gGmbH（巴克豪森研究所）
Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology（维斯瓦瓦拉亚国家理工学院）
The field of autonomous robotics is growing at a rapid rate. The trend to use increasingly more sensors in vehicles is driven both by legislation and consumer demands for higher safety and reliable service. Nowadays, robots are found everywhere, ranging from homes, hospitals to industries, and military operations. Autonomous robots are developed to be robust enough to work beside humans and to carry out jobs efficiently. Humans have a natural sense of understanding of the physical forces acting around them like gravity, sense of motion, etc. which are not taught explicitly but are developed na…
University of Nevada, Reno（内华达大学里诺分校）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Dong-A University（东亚大学）
The threat to safety of aging bridges has been recognized as a critical concern to the general public due to the poor condition of many bridges in the U.S. Currently, the bridge inspection is conducted manually, and it is not efficient to identify bridge condition deterioration in order to facilitate implementation of appropriate maintenance or rehabilitation procedures. In this paper, we report a new development of the autonomous mobile robotic system for bridge deck inspection and evaluation. The robot is integrated with several nondestructive evaluation (NDE) sensors and a navigation contro…
