Safe Flight Envelope Prediction and Experimental Validation of Multirotor UAV: An Analysis on the Effects of Longitudinal Center of Gravity Position and Actuator Dynamics on Quadcopter Flight Envelopes

Loss of control (LOC) is the primary cause of failure of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). The safety of these systems can be largely improved by facilitating techniques to prevent LOC to occur, such as Flight Envelope Protection, enabling controllers to keep the system within the Safe Flight Envelope (SFE).<br/>The aim of this work is to examine...

Trajectory Pruning with Neural Networks for Efficient Monte-Carlo based Quadrotor Flight Envelope Prediction

Flight envelope prediction is a challenging task where one of the difficulties is that widely used methods, like the level set methods, are impractical for systems with more than four coupled state dimensions due to the “curse of dimensionality”. Monte-Carlo simulation based approach suffers less from this, however a large number of simulations...

Applying Koopman Methods for Nonlinear Reachability Analysis

In this thesis we investigate the possibilities for applying Koopman methods for reachability analysis. Reachability analysis is a verification process used to determine that a dynamical system starting in an initial set X0 cannot reach a certain set of dangerous states D within a time interval [0,T]. Koopman methods seem promising, because they...

4th Harbour Scheveningen: Masterplan

This report considers a possible port expansion in port of Scheveningen, The Netherlands. The problems considered are brought forwards in the plans introduced by Dr. Ir. Waterman and are tackled from multiple disciplines. These problems relate to the recharge of the freshwater-lens, reachability of the port, flood protection of the Tweede Haven,...

Automatic robust controller synthesis: With application to a wet clutch system

A wet clutch is a device that transfers torque between two shafts via a hydraulic mechanism. Wet clutch control is key to achieve smooth and fast clutch engagements. Optimal control of a wet clutch is not trivial because of the complexity of the system due to nonlinearities, hybrid dynamics and changing dynamics over time due to changing...

Envelope Estimation and Protection of Innovative Control Effectors (ICE) Aircraft: A Probabilistic Approach

Loss of control is considered as the primary cause of fatal accidents in aviation, which occurs when the aircraft has left the safe flight envelope. To reduce loss-of-control-related accidents, it is important to estimate the safe flight envelope at the current flight condition and integrate it into flight control system design. This task is...

Safe Flight Envelope Uncertainty Quantification using Probabilistic Reachability Analysis

Loss of Control is the primary contributor to aviation fatalities. To prevent this type of accident, flight envelope protection is considered to be a necessary development. The calculation of the Safe Flight Envelope provides a bound on the states that can safely be approached by the aircraft. Although theoretically accurate, some states may not...

Robot Placement for Mobile Manipulation in Domestic Environments

The development of domestic mobile manipulators for unconstrained environments has driven significant research recently. Robot Care Systems has been pioneering in developing a prototype of a mobile manipulator for elderly care. It has a 6 degrees of freedom robotic arm mounted on their flagship robot LEA, a non-holonomic differential drive...

Nonlinear Reachability Analysis using Multivariate B-splines

The determination of the safe flight envelope can greatly improve aviation safety. Level Set methods, which can determine the safe flight envelope, have an unfavorable dimensional scaling that complicates an on-line application. The results of a novel method based on multivariate B-splines are presented in this research. Unlike Level Set methods...

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...

Reachability and task execution speed analysis of a resonating robotic arm

This thesis analyses the range of motion of a resonating robotic arm under motor torque and time limitations and shows the beneficial effects it has on the speed of executing a pick and place task.