Guaranteed Cost Attitude Tracking Control for Uncertain Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Under Safety Constraints

In this paper,guaranteed cost attitude tracking con-trol for uncertain quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle(QUAV)under safety constraints is studied.First,an augmented system is constructed by the tracking error system and reference system.This transformation aims to convert the tracking control prob-lem into a stabilization control problem.Then,control barrier function and disturbance attenuation function are designed to characterize the violations of safety constraints and tolerance of uncertain disturbances,and they are incorporated into the reward function as penalty items.Based on the modified reward function,the problem is simplified as the optimal regulation problem of the nominal augmented system,and a new Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is developed.Finally,critic-only rein-forcement learning algorithm with a concurrent learning tech-nique is employed to solve the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equa-tion and obtain the optimal controller.The proposed algorithm can not only ensure the reward function within an upper bound in the presence of uncertain disturbances,but also enforce safety constraints.The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by the numerical simulation.

Nonlinear Intelligent Flight Control for Quadrotor Unmanned Helicopter

Quadrotor unmanned helicopter is a new popular research platform for unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV),thanks to its simple construction,vertical take-off and landing(VTOL)capability.Here a nonlinear intelligent flight control system is developed for quadrotor unmanned helicopter,including trajectory control loop composed of co-controller and state estimator,and attitude control loop composed of brain emotional learning(BEL)intelligent controller.BEL intelligent controller based on mammalian middle brain is characterized as self-learning capability,model-free and robustness.Simulation results of a small quadrotor unmanned helicopter show that the BEL intelligent controller-based flight control system has faster dynamical responses with higher precision than the traditional controller-based system.

Fuzzy Self-adaptive Proportional Integration Differential Control for Attitude Stabilization of Quadrotor UAV

The technology of attitude control for quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles(UAVs) is one of the most important UAVs' research areas.In order to achieve a satisfactory operation in quadrotor UAVs having proportional integration differential(PID) controllers,it is necessary to appropriately adjust the controller coefficients which are dependent on dynamic parameters of the quadrotor UAV and any changes in parameters and conditions could affect desired performance of the controller.In this paper,combining with PID control and fuzzy logic control,a kind of fuzzy self-adaptive PID control algorithm for attitude stabilization of the quadrotor UAV was put forward.Firstly,the nonlinear model of six degrees of freedom(6-DOF) for quadrotor UAV is established.Secondly,for obtaining the attitude of quadrotor,attitude data fusion using complementary filtering is applied to improving the measurement accuracy and dynamic performance.Finally,the attitude stabilization control simulation model of the quadrotor UAV is build,and the self-adaptive fuzzy parameter tuning rules for PID attitude controller are given,so as to realize the online self-tuning of the controller parameters.Simulation results show that comparing with the conventional PID controller,this attitude control algorithm of fuzzy self-adaptive PID has a better dynamic response performance.

Flocking control of a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles

Current applications using single unmanned vehicle have been gradually extended to multiple ones due to their increased efficiency in mission accomplishment, expanded coverage areas and ranges, as well as enhanced system reliability. This paper presents a flocking control method with application to a fleet of unmanned quadrotor helicopters （UQHs）. Three critical characteristics of formation keeping, collision avoidance, and velocity matching have been taken into account in the algorithm development to make it capable of accomplishing the desired objectives （like forest/pipeline surveillance） by safely and efficiently operating a group of UQHs. To achieve these, three layered system design philosophy is considered in this study. The first layer is the flocking controller which is designed based on the kinematics of UQH. The modified Cucker and Smale model is used for guaranteeing the convergence of UQHs to flocking, while a repelling force between each two UQHs is also added for ensuring a specified safety distance. The second layer is the motion controller which is devised based on the kinetics of UQH by employing the augmented state-feedback control approach to greatly minimize the steady-state error. The last layer is the UQH system along with its actuators. Two primary contributions have been made in this work： first, different from most of the existing works conducted on agents with double integrator dynamics, a new flocking control algorithm has been designed and implemented on a group of UQHs with nonlinear dynamics. Furthermore, the constraint of fixed neighbouring distance in formation has been relaxed expecting to significantly reduce the complexity caused by the increase of agents number and provide more flexibility to the formation control. Extensive numerical simulations on a group of UQH nonlinear models have been carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.