ArduPilot-Based Adaptive Autopilot: Architecture and Software-in-The-Loop Experiments

This article presents an adaptive method for ArduPilot-based autopilots of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ArduPilot is a popular open-source unmanned vehicle software suite. We explore how to augment the PID loops embedded inside ArduPilot with a model-free adaptive control method. The adaptive augmentation, adopted for both...

Relaxing the control-gain assumptions of DSC design for nonlinear MIMO systems

This work focuses on adaptive neural dynamic surface control (DSC) for an extended class of nonlinear MIMO strict-feedback systems whose control gain functions are continuous and possibly unbounded. The method is based on introducing a compact set which is eventually proved to be an invariant set: thanks to this set, the restrictive...

A university building test case for occupancy-based building automation

Heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) units in buildings form a system-of-subsystems entity that must be accurately integrated and controlled by the building automation system to ensure the occupants' comfort with reduced energy consumption. As control of HVACs involves a standardized hierarchy of high-level set-point control and...

Fault detection and identification for a class of continuous piecewise affine systems with unknown subsystems and partitions

This paper establishes a novel online fault detection and identification strategy for a class of continuous piecewise affine (PWA) systems, namely, bimodal and trimodal PWA systems. The main contributions with respect to the state-of-the-art are the recursive nature of the proposed scheme and the consideration of parametric uncertainties in...

Adaptive path following for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in time-varying unknown wind environments

In this paper, an adaptive control scheme for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) path following under slowly time-varying wind is developed. The proposed control strategy integrates the path following law based on the vector field method with an adaptive term counteracting the effect of wind's unknown component. In particular, it is shown that...