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Engineering Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Brigham Young University

Theses and Dissertations

2007

UAV

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Decentralized Control Of Multiple Uavs For Perimeter And Target Surveillance, Derek B. Kingston Jul 2007

Decentralized Control Of Multiple Uavs For Perimeter And Target Surveillance, Derek B. Kingston

Theses and Dissertations

With the recent development of reliable autonomous technologies for small unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), the algorithms utilizing teams of these vehicles are becoming an increasingly important research area. Unfortunately, there is no unified framework into which all (or even most) cooperative control problems fall. Five factors that affect the development of cooperative control algorithms are objective coupling, communication, completeness, robustness, and efficiency. We classify cooperative control algorithms by these factors and then present three algorithms with application to target and perimeter surveillance and a method for decentralized algorithm design. The primary contributions of this research are the development and analysis …


Transitions Between Hover And Level Flight For A Tailsitter Uav, Stephen R. Osborne Jul 2007

Transitions Between Hover And Level Flight For A Tailsitter Uav, Stephen R. Osborne

Theses and Dissertations

Vertical Take-Off and Land (VTOL) Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) possess several desirable characteristics, such as being able to hover and take-off or land in confined areas. One type of VTOL airframe, the tailsitter, has all of these advantages, as well as being able to fly in the more energy-efficient level flight mode. The tailsitter can track trajectories that successfully transition between hover and level flight modes. Three methods for performing transitions are described: a simple controller, a feedback linearization controller, and an adaptive controller. An autopilot navigational state machine with appropriate transitioning between level and hover waypoints is also presented. …


Particle Filter Based Mosaicking For Forest Fire Tracking, Justin Mathew Bradley Jul 2007

Particle Filter Based Mosaicking For Forest Fire Tracking, Justin Mathew Bradley

Theses and Dissertations

Using autonomous miniature air vehicles (MAVs) is a cost-effective, simple method for collecting data about the size, shape, and location characteristics of a forest fire. However, noise in measurements used to compute pose (location and attitude) of the on-board camera leads to significant errors in the processing of collected video data. Typical methods using MAVs to track fires attempt to find single geolocation estimates and filter that estimate with subsequent observations. While this is an effective method of resolving the noise to achieve a better geolocation estimate, it reduces a fire to a single point or small set of points. …