Using a Large 2 Degree of Freedom Tail for Autonomous Aerobatics on a Flapping Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Author(s):  
Luke Roberts ◽  
Hugh Bruck ◽  
S. K. Gupta

Flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicles (FWUAVs) provide an alternative to traditional platforms because they are more maneuverable than fixed wing platforms while being faster, quieter, and more natural looking than rotary wing platforms. While real birds are able to execute complex and highly controlled aerobatic maneuvers, executing FWUAV aerobatics presents unique challenges due to difficulty in execution of controlled quick orientation change. This paper demonstrates a simple method for using a large 2 degree of freedom tail for quick orientation changes and flight control, enabling execution of a pre-programmed backflip maneuver on the Robo Raven V, a hybrid FWUAV. The platform reached angular velocities of up to 420° per second during the maneuver.

Author(s):  
Chimpalthradi R Ashokkumar ◽  
George WP York ◽  
Scott F Gruber

Flight formations of unmanned aerial vehicles may require coordinated motion in pitch for such tasks as terrain tracking. They maintain a constant altitude over varying terrain elevations and may assist collision avoidance where an altitude change is needed rather than a lateral change. In these maneuvers, controller ability to adjust relative altitude positions (as attractions and repulsions) of the aircraft subject to stability constraints that ends up in a formation shape should be demonstrated. The ascent and descent flight control mode combinations of each unmanned aerial vehicle participating in the formation generally offer the attractions and repulsions. In this paper, centralized and decentralized controller abilities to develop a cooperative formation with flight control modes made of transients and steady states are presented by using two and more than two homogenous unmanned aerial vehicles. A challenge in presenting such a formation by using a centralized controller is its design itself. Generally, eigenstructure properties depict flight control mode variations. That is, variations in closed-loop poles offered by a structurally varying centralized controller compatible to its reconfigurable communication patterns are sufficient to capture the flight control mode options. Hence, a procedure to design such a controller using real parameters is presented.


Aviation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Mirosław Adamski

The article is an independent work containing the author’s ingenious research methodology and the model of the control system of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Furthermore a unique and world first mathematical model of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle was developed, as well as a simulation program which enabled to investigate the control system of any Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the tilt duct pitch (altitude), bank (direction), deviation and velocity, depending upon the variable values of the steering coefficient, reinforcement coefficient and the derivative constant. The research program was written in the language of the C++ as the MFC class, on the MS Visual Studio 2010 platform. The main issue resolved in the article is the pioneering research of the process of control during manual and semi-automatic guidance of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, with a jet propulsion system to the coordinates of preset points of the flight route. Modelling of the flight control system takes into account: the logical network of operations of the simulation program, the pilot-operator model, the set motion and control deviations as well as the flight control laws. In addition, modeling of the control system takes into account the drive model, engine dynamics, engine thrust, the model of steering actuators and the model of external loads. In contrast, the external load model takes into account the external forces acting on the unmanned aircraft, including gravitational forces and moments, aerodynamic forces and moments, aerodynamic drag, aerodynamic lateral forces, aerodynamic lift forces, aerodynamic heeling moment, mechanism of local angle of attack from damping torque and forces and moments from the engine.


Author(s):  
Öztürk Özdemir Kanat ◽  
Ertuğrul Karatay ◽  
Oğuz Köse ◽  
Tuğrul Oktay

In this article, combined active flow control system and flight control system design for morphing unmanned aerial vehicles is applied for the first time for autonomous flight performance maximization. For this purpose, longitudinal and lateral dynamics modeling of morphing unmanned aerial vehicle having active flow control manufactured in Erciyes University, Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Model Aircraft Laboratory is considered in order to obtain simulation environments. Our produced morphing unmanned aerial vehicle is called as ZANKA-II, which has a mass of 6.5 kg, range of 30 km, endurance of 0.5 h, and ceiling altitude of 6000 m. von Karman turbulence modeling is used in order to model atmospheric turbulence during flight in both longitudinal and lateral simulation environments. A stochastic optimization method called as simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation is also applied for the first time in order to obtain optimum dimensions of morphing parameters (i.e. extension ratios of wingspan and tail span), optimum positions of blowers, and optimum magnitudes of longitudinal and lateral controllers' gains (i.e. P, I, and D gains) while minimizing cost index capturing terms for both longitudinal and lateral autonomous flight performances and there exist lower and upper constraints on all optimization variables in the literature.


2012 ◽  
Vol 152-154 ◽  
pp. 1149-1154
Author(s):  
Dong Liang Zhao ◽  
Amir M. Anvar

The Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) Maritime Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (MUAV) has a number of applications including surveillance, search & rescue and real-time communications within a maritime environment. The objectives of this work is to study, research, design and develop, up to implantation, methodologies to apply efficient Command, Control, Navigation and Avionics Scenarios for VTOL-UAV robot operations within maritime air environments. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the overall control system of a five-rotor MUAV and the theoretical analysis of the control system. The controller is derived from the Paparazzi system, which is an open source community hardware and software package for all forms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs).


2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (7) ◽  
pp. 828-839
Author(s):  
Thinh Hoang Dinh ◽  
Hieu Le Thi Hong

Autonomous landing of rotary wing type unmanned aerial vehicles is a challenging problem and key to autonomous aerial fleet operation. We propose a method for localizing the UAV around the helipad, that is to estimate the relative position of the helipad with respect to the UAV. This data is highly desirable to design controllers that have robust and consistent control characteristics and can find applications in search – rescue operations. AI-based neural network is set up for helipad detection, followed by optimization by the localization algorithm. The performance of this approach is compared against fiducial marker approach, demonstrating good consensus between two estimations


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 391
Author(s):  
Luca Bigazzi ◽  
Stefano Gherardini ◽  
Giacomo Innocenti ◽  
Michele Basso

In this paper, solutions for precise maneuvering of an autonomous small (e.g., 350-class) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are designed and implemented from smart modifications of non expensive mass market technologies. The considered class of vehicles suffers from light load, and, therefore, only a limited amount of sensors and computing devices can be installed on-board. Then, to make the prototype capable of moving autonomously along a fixed trajectory, a “cyber-pilot”, able on demand to replace the human operator, has been implemented on an embedded control board. This cyber-pilot overrides the commands thanks to a custom hardware signal mixer. The drone is able to localize itself in the environment without ground assistance by using a camera possibly mounted on a 3 Degrees Of Freedom (DOF) gimbal suspension. A computer vision system elaborates the video stream pointing out land markers with known absolute position and orientation. This information is fused with accelerations from a 6-DOF Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to generate a “virtual sensor” which provides refined estimates of the pose, the absolute position, the speed and the angular velocities of the drone. Due to the importance of this sensor, several fusion strategies have been investigated. The resulting data are, finally, fed to a control algorithm featuring a number of uncoupled digital PID controllers which work to bring to zero the displacement from the desired trajectory.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 5772
Author(s):  
Dawid Lis ◽  
Adam Januszko ◽  
Tadeusz Dobrocinski

The purpose of this article is to present and discuss the results of a non-standard unnamed aerial vehicle construction with a constant cross-section square-shaped avionic profile. Based on the model’s in-air observed maneuverability, the research of avionic construction behavior was carried out in a water tunnel. The results show the model’s specific lift capabilities in comparison to classical avionic constructions. The characteristic results of the lift coefficient showed that the unmanned aerial vehicle presents favorable features than classic avionic constructions. The model was created with the prospect of using it in the future for dual-use purposes, where unmanned aerial vehicles are currently experiencing very rapid development. When creating the prototype, the focus was on low production cost, as well as convenience in operation. The development of this type of breakthrough avionic solution, which shows extraordinary maneuverability, may contribute to increasing the popularity and, above all, the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles for the largest possible group of recipients because of high avionic properties in relation to the technical construction complexity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 175682932110168
Author(s):  
Hasan Karali ◽  
Gokhan Inalhan ◽  
M Umut Demirezen ◽  
M Adil Yukselen

In this work, a computationally efficient and high-precision nonlinear aerodynamic configuration analysis method is presented for both design optimization and mathematical modeling of small unmanned aerial vehicles. First, we have developed a novel nonlinear lifting line method which (a) provides very good match for the pre- and post-stall aerodynamic behavior in comparison to experiments and computationally intensive tools, (b) generates these results in order of magnitudes less time in comparison to computationally intensive methods such as computational fluid dynamics. This method is further extended to a complete configuration analysis tool that incorporates the effects of basic fuselage geometries. Moreover, a deep learning based surrogate model is developed using data generated by the new aerodynamic tool that can characterize the nonlinear aerodynamic performance of unmanned aerial vehicles. The major novel feature of this model is that it can predict the aerodynamic properties of unmanned aerial vehicle configurations by using only geometric parameters without the need for any special input data or pre-process phase as needed by other computational aerodynamic analysis tools. The obtained black-box function can calculate the performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle over a wide angle of attack range on the order of milliseconds, whereas computational fluid dynamics solutions take several days/weeks in a similar computational environment. The aerodynamic model predictions show an almost 1-1 coincidence with the numerical data even for configurations with different airfoils that are not used in model training. The developed model provides a highly capable aerodynamic solver for design optimization studies as demonstrated through an illustrative profile design example.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4540
Author(s):  
Leszek Ambroziak ◽  
Maciej Ciężkowski

The following paper presents a method for the use of a virtual electric dipole potential field to control a leader-follower formation of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The proposed control algorithm uses a virtual electric dipole potential field to determine the desired heading for a UAV follower. This method’s greatest advantage is the ability to rapidly change the potential field function depending on the position of the independent leader. Another advantage is that it ensures formation flight safety regardless of the positions of the initial leader or follower. Moreover, it is also possible to generate additional potential fields which guarantee obstacle and vehicle collision avoidance. The considered control system can easily be adapted to vehicles with different dynamics without the need to retune heading control channel gains and parameters. The paper closely describes and presents in detail the synthesis of the control algorithm based on vector fields obtained using scalar virtual electric dipole potential fields. The proposed control system was tested and its operation was verified through simulations. Generated potential fields as well as leader-follower flight parameters have been presented and thoroughly discussed within the paper. The obtained research results validate the effectiveness of this formation flight control method as well as prove that the described algorithm improves flight formation organization and helps ensure collision-free conditions.


Author(s):  
E. G. Semenova ◽  
◽  
M. I. Bakustina ◽  

The article is devoted to the creation of a method for preparing an unmanned aerial vehicle for implementation as a finished packaged product. To achieve the goal, modern methods of standardization and quality control are used.


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