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Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Autonomous Uav Battery Swapping, Reed Jacobsen, Nikolai Ruhe, Nathan Dornback
Autonomous Uav Battery Swapping, Reed Jacobsen, Nikolai Ruhe, Nathan Dornback
Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects
One of the main hindrances of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology are power constraints. One way to alleviate some power constraints would be for two UAVs to exchange batteries while both are in flight. Autonomous mid-air battery swapping will expand the scope of UAV technology by allowing for indefinite flight times and longer missions. A single board computer will control each UAV’s flight software to respond to inputs to align with each other mid-flight. When the two UAVs have joined, mechanical components will exchange a depleted battery on the worker UAV for a freshly charged battery that belongs to the …
Autonomous Quadrotor Collision Avoidance And Destination Seeking In A Gps-Denied Environment, Thomas C. Kirven
Autonomous Quadrotor Collision Avoidance And Destination Seeking In A Gps-Denied Environment, Thomas C. Kirven
Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering
This thesis presents a real-time autonomous guidance and control method for a quadrotor in a GPS-denied environment. The quadrotor autonomously seeks a destination while it avoids obstacles whose shape and position are initially unknown. We implement the obstacle avoidance and destination seeking methods using off-the-shelf sensors, including a vision-sensing camera. The vision-sensing camera detects the positions of points on the surface of obstacles. We use this obstacle position data and a potential-field method to generate velocity commands. We present a backstepping controller that uses the velocity commands to generate the quadrotor's control inputs. In indoor experiments, we demonstrate that the …
Adaptive Nonlinear Control For Autonomous Ground Vehicles, William Spencer Black
Adaptive Nonlinear Control For Autonomous Ground Vehicles, William Spencer Black
Open Access Theses
We present the background and motivation for ground vehicle autonomy, and focus on uses for space-exploration. Using a simple design example of an autonomous ground vehicle we derive the equations of motion. After providing the mathematical background for nonlinear systems and control we present two common methods for exactly linearizing nonlinear systems, feedback linearization and backstepping. We use these in combination with three adaptive control methods: model reference adaptive control, adaptive sliding mode control, and extremum-seeking model reference adaptive control. We show the performances of each combination through several simulation results. We then consider disturbances in the system, and design …