System Identification I

Classifications, applications, and design challenges of drones: A review

Recently, there has been growing interest in developing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) with advanced onboard autonomous capabilities. This paper describes the current state of the art in autonomous rotorcraft UAS (RUAS) and provides a detailed literature review of the last two decades of active research on RUAS. Three functional technology areas are identified as the core components of an autonomous RUAS. Guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) have received much attention from the research community, and have dominated the UAS literature from the nineties until now. This paper first presents the main research groups involved in the development of GNC systems for RUAS. Then it describes the development of a framework that provides standard definitions and metrics characterizing and measuring the autonomy level of a RUAS using GNC aspects. This framework is intended to facilitate the understanding and the organization of this survey paper, but it can also serve as a common reference for the UAS community. The main objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey of RUAS research that captures all seminal works and milestones in each GNC area, with a particular focus on practical methods and technologies that have been demonstrated in flight tests. These algorithms and systems have been classified into different categories and classes based on the autonomy level they provide and the algorithmic approach used. Finally, the paper discusses the RUAS literature in general and highlights challenges that need to be addressed in developing autonomous systems for unmanned rotorcraft. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Survey of advances in guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned rotorcraft systems

Review on Application of Drone Systems in Precision Agriculture

Within the research on Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), the field on flight control and autonomous mission execution is one of the most active. A crucial point is the localization of the vehicle, which is especially difficult in unknown, GPS-denied environments. This paper presents a novel vision based approach, where the vehicle is localized using a downward looking monocular camera. A state-of-the-art visual SLAM algorithm tracks the pose of the camera, while, simultaneously, building an incremental map of the surrounding region. Based on this pose estimation a LQG/LTR based controller stabilizes the vehicle at a desired setpoint, making simple maneuvers possible like take-off, hovering, setpoint following or landing. Experimental data show that this approach efficiently controls a helicopter while navigating through an unknown and unstructured environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work describing a micro aerial vehicle able to navigate through an unexplored environment (independently of any external aid like GPS or artificial beacons), which uses a single camera as only exteroceptive sensor.

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Vision based MAV navigation in unknown and unstructured environments

This paper provides a brief overview on the recent advances of small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from the perspective of platforms, key elements, and scientific research. The survey starts with an introduction of the recent advances of small-scale UAV platforms, based on the information summarized from 132 models available worldwide. Next, the evolvement of the key elements, including onboard processing units, navigation sensors, mission-oriented sensors, communication modules, and ground control station, is presented and analyzed. Third, achievements of small-scale UAV research, particularly on platform design and construction, dynamics modeling, and flight control, are introduced. Finally, the future of small-scale UAVs' research, civil applications, and military applications are forecasted.

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A Survey of Small-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Recent Advances and Future Development Trends

Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems explores the research and development of fully-functional miniature UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) rotorcraft, and provides a complete treatment of the design of autonomous miniature rotorcraft UAVs. The unmanned system is an integration of advanced technologies developed in communications, computing, and control areas, and is an excellent testing ground for trialing and implementing modern control techniques. Included are detailed expositions of systematic hardware construction, software systems integration, aerodynamic modeling; and automatic flight control system design.Emphasis is placed on the cooperative control and flight formation of multiple UAVs, vision-based ground target tracking, and landing on moving platforms. Other issues such as the development of GPS-less indoor micro aerial vehicles and vision-based navigation are also discussed in depth: utilizing the vision-based system for accomplishing ground target tracking, attacking and landing, cooperative control and flight formation of multiple unmanned rotorcraft; and future research directions on the related areas.

https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/productFlyer/productFlyer-WEST_978-0-85729-634-4.pdf?SGWID=0-0-1297-174116371-bookseller

Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems

We introduce a simple method to fabricate a highly flexible resistive-type strain sensor composed of carbon paper (CP) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer. The key resistance sensitive material of the sensor, carbon paper, is prepared from tissue paper by a simple high-temperature pyrolysis process. At the same time, the as-fabricated CP/PDMS strain senor is highly sensitive to applied strain with a gauge factor of 25.3, almost 10 times higher than that of conventional metallic strain gauge. Furthermore, the response of CP/PDMS strain sensor under cyclic tensile strain with a peak strain of 3% was also investigated, which exhibits fast and steady response with excellent durability within the frequency range 0.01–10 Hz. Finally, we demonstrate the successful utilization of the CP/PDMS strain sensor as wearable electronics in breath monitoring and robot controlling. The eminent performance, low material cost, and facile fabrication process make the CP/PDMS strain sensor exceptionally promising in flex...

Guowei Cai

Papers

A Survey of Small-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Recent Advances and Future Development Trends

Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems

Highly Flexible Strain Sensor from Tissue Paper for Wearable Electronics

A survey of hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Brief paper: Design and implementation of an autonomous flight control law for a UAV helicopter