Path planning for Lunar rovers: A lunar surface path finding and obstacle avoidance algorithm

The unique six-legged swarming rover Lunar Zebro is designed and produced by students from the Delft University of Technology. The objective of the rover is to accomplish an autonomous mission on the Lunar surface by 2024. This thesis evaluates a path planning algorithm that is designed for autonomous navigation in the Lunar environment. The...

A Fixed-Wing UAV Formation Algorithm Based on Vector Field Guidance

The vector field method was originally proposed to guide a single fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) towards a desired path. In this work, a non-uniform vector field method is proposed that changes in both magnitude and direction, for the purpose of achieving formations of UAVs. As compared to related work in the literature, the...

Navigation and coordination of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles under mission uncertainty

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been emerging as a promising but challenging platform for studying autonomous and cooperative control. This Ph.D. thesis focuses on fixed-wing UAVs which, with their more efficient aerodynamics, can ensure longer flight durations and more autonomy than multi-rotorUAVs. However, in the current state of the art...

Cohomological local-to-global principles and integration in finite- and infinite-dimensional Lie theory

The subject of this thesis is twofold: The first part is the study of local-to-global principles for the continuous Lie algebra (co-)homology of certain infinite-dimensional Lie algebras of geometric origin, specifically, Gelfand-Fuks cohomology and continuous cohomology of gauge algebras. It includes both an exposition to classical results of...

Efficient Methods for Spectral Geometry Processing

Research in geometry processing concerns the design of algorithms and mathematical models for the analysis and manipulation of geometric data. Examples of its applications are shape projection (e.g. smoothing and filtering), shape correspondence (e.g. functional maps), shape descriptors (e.g. heat and wave kernel signatures), segmentation, and...

Adaptive Vector Field Guidance Without a Priori Knowledge of Course Dynamics and Wind

The high maneuverability of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) exposes these systems to several dynamical and parametric uncertainties, severely affecting the fidelity of modeling and causing limited guidance autonomy. This article shows enhanced autonomy via adaptation mechanisms embedded in the guidance law: a vector-field method is...

Vector field formation control: Fixed-wing formation control based on time-varying vector field

The mission control of a fixed-wings UAV is slightly more complex compared to other models like quad-rotors or unicycles since the dynamic of a fixed-wing aircraft does not allow rapid direction changes or stop-rotate-go type of movements. Those restriction needs to be taken into consideration when building a mission control system, moreover,...

Addressing Unmodeled Path-Following Dynamics via Adaptive Vector Field: A UAV Test Case

The actual performance of model-based path-following methods for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) shows considerable dependence on the wind knowledge and on the fidelity of the dynamic model used for design. This study analyzes and demonstrates the performance of an adaptive vector field (VF) control law which can compensate for the lack of...

Autopilot Design for Software-in-the-Loop Validation of Fixed-wing UAV Guidance Laws

UnmannedAerial Vehicles(UAVs) have multi-domain applications and fixed-wing UAVs are a widely used class. There is ongoing research on topics in view to optimize the control and guidance of UAVs. This work explores the design, implementation and Software-in-the-Loop validation of an autopilot using adaptive guidance laws with emphasis on...

Localized Tangential Vector Fields for the use in Tangent Vector Field Design: A Vector Field Design Approach with the use of Localized Basis Fields

The use of tangential vector fields and thus the need for designing them has steadily been increasing over the years. In this master thesis, a method is proposed and implemented that defines localized tangential vector fields on a mesh surface, which allows for the designing of vector fields on the triangulated surfaces of these meshes....

Vector Field Based Path Following for UAVs using Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion

This work presents a vector field based path following method to be used by Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The desired path to be followed is a smooth planar path defined in its implicit form. The vector field around the desired path is then constructed using the implicit function, such that the integral curves of the vector field...

A Guiding Vector-Field algorithm for path-following control of nonholonomic mobile robots

In this paper, we propose an algorithm for path-following control of the nonholonomic mobile robot based on the idea of the guiding vector field (GVF). The desired path may be an arbitrary smooth curve in its implicit form, that is, a level set of a predefined smooth function. Using this function and the robot's kinematic model, we design a...

Modeling n-Symmetry Vector Fields using Higher-Order Energies

We introduce a variational approach for modeling n-symmetry vector and direction fields on surfaces that supports interpolation and alignment constraints, placing singularities and local editing, while providing real-time responses. The approach is based on novel biharmonic and m-harmonic energies for n-fields on surface meshes and the...

Guiding vector field algorithm for a moving path following problem

This paper presents a guidance algorithm solving the problem of moving path following, that is, steering a mobile robot to a curvilinear path attached to a moving frame. The nonholonomic robot is described by the unicycle-type model under the influence of some constant exogenous disturbance. The desired path may be an arbitrary smooth curve...

Collision avoidance with haptic feedback for telepresence: An intelligent data management approach

The use of telepresence becomes an alternative in scenarios such as deep sea maneuvers, inspection and maintenance in hazardous environments or aerial surveillance tasks, amongst some other robotic tasks. In some of these cases, human deployment might be dangerous, expensive and even not possible yet. Because of the wide variety and increasing...

Spatial-temporal pathline clustering based on FTLE fields

Cardiac flow acquisition is a young and ongoing field of research which provides us with a vast amount of unsteady 3D blood flow data of the heart (4D vector fields). These 4D vector fields of the heart are used in clinical research to gain insight in the flow patterns within the heart which in turn can be used to gain a better understanding of...

Invariance Kernels of Single-Input Planar Nonlinear Systems

The problem of determining invariance kernels for planar single-input nonlinear systems is considered. If K is a closed set, its invariance kernel is the largest subset of K with the property of being positively invariant for arbitrary measurable input signals. It is shown that the boundary of the invariance kernel is a concatenation of...