Autonomous Collision Avoidance for Swarms of MAVs: Based solely on RSSI measurements

Swarming is a promising solution for extending the flight time and payload carrying capabilities of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), where recent years have brought many advancements. These allow MAVs to operate ever more autonomously by tackling problems such as obstacle avoidance and autonomous navigation. A major challenge that still remains,...

An optimal control approach for estimating aircraft command margins

This dissertation presents an optimal control framework to determine a collection of open-loop command signals, that mathematically guarantees operation of a dynamical system within prescribed state constraints. The framework is applied to estimate real-time command margins for aircraft control systems so that, safe operation within the flight...

Stereo Vision for Flapping Wing MAVs: Design of an Obstacle Avoidance system

In the field of Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) research the use of flapping wings attracts a lot of interest. The potential of flapping wings lies in their efficiency at small scales and their large flight envelope with a single configuration. They have the possibility of performing both energy efficient long distance flights as well as hovering...

Vision-based automatic landing of a quadrotor UAV on a floating platform: A new approach using incremental backstepping

The development of systems that allow unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, to perform tasks autonomously is a current trend in aerospace research. The specific aim of this thesis is to study and achieve vision-based automatic landing of a quadrotor UAV on a floating platform, a known target that possesses oscillatory behavior. The research...

Fixed-Wing UAV Integrated Navigation with Low-Cost IMU/GPS

Today, there is an increase in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's), for applications that can be considered dull, dirty or dangerous when compared to those applications of conventional aircraft or helicopters. To further increase the use of UAV's, their navigation filters must be robust and reliable. The trend in current autopilot...

Nonlinear Flight Control: Fault Tolerant Control with Sliding Modes and Control Allocation

Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) is a promising method for Fault Tolerant Flight Control. The NDI algorithm cancels out the aircraft dynamics based on a dynamic aircraft model such that the closed loop system behaves linearly. The aircraft model is estimated online, which allows it to accommodate changes in the aircraft configurations and...

Optical Flow Based State Estimation for an Indoor Micro Aerial Vehicle

This work addresses the problem of indoor state estimation for autonomous flying vehicles with an optic flow approach. The paper discusses a sensor configuration using six optic flow sensors of the computer mouse type augmented by a three-axis accelerometer to estimate velocity, rotation, attitude and viewing distances. It is shown that the...

Terminal area energy management trajectory optimization using interval analysis