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Enabling Autonomous Operation Of Micro Aerial Vehicles Through Gps To Gps-Denied Transitions, James Scott Jackson
Enabling Autonomous Operation Of Micro Aerial Vehicles Through Gps To Gps-Denied Transitions, James Scott Jackson
Theses and Dissertations
Micro aerial vehicles and other autonomous systems have the potential to truly transform life as we know it, however much of the potential of autonomous systems remains unrealized because reliable navigation is still an unsolved problem with significant challenges. This dissertation presents solutions to many aspects of autonomous navigation. First, it presents ROSflight, a software and hardware architure that allows for rapid prototyping and experimentation of autonomy algorithms on MAVs with lightweight, efficient flight control. Next, this dissertation presents improvments to the state-of-the-art in optimal control of quadrotors by utilizing the error-state formulation frequently utilized in state estimation. It is …
Cooperative Navigation Of Fixed-Wing Micro Air Vehicles In Gps-Denied Environments, Gary James Ellingson
Cooperative Navigation Of Fixed-Wing Micro Air Vehicles In Gps-Denied Environments, Gary James Ellingson
Theses and Dissertations
Micro air vehicles have recently gained popularity due to their potential as autonomous systems. Their future impact, however, will depend in part on how well they can navigate in GPS-denied and GPS-degraded environments. In response to this need, this dissertation investigates a potential solution for GPS-denied operations called relative navigation. The method utilizes keyframe-to-keyframe odometry estimates and their covariances in a global back end that represents the global state as a pose graph. The back end is able to effectively represent nonlinear uncertainties and incorporate opportunistic global constraints. The GPS-denied research community has, for the most part, neglected to consider …
Robust Visual-Inertial Navigation And Control Of Fixed-Wing And Multirotor Aircraft, Jerel Bendt Nielsen
Robust Visual-Inertial Navigation And Control Of Fixed-Wing And Multirotor Aircraft, Jerel Bendt Nielsen
Theses and Dissertations
With the increased performance and reduced cost of cameras, the robotics community has taken great interest in estimation and control algorithms that fuse camera data with other sensor data.In response to this interest, this dissertation investigates the algorithms needed for robust guidance, navigation, and control of fixed-wing and multirotor aircraft applied to target estimation and circumnavigation.This work begins with the development of a method to estimate target position relative to static landmarks, deriving and using a state-of-the-art EKF that estimates static landmarks in its state.Following this estimator, improvements are made to a nonlinear observer solving part of the SLAM problem.These …