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This paper describes an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) ice tracking framework for use in sea ice management applications. The framework is intended to be used in an ice management scenario where the UAV should detect and track the movement of icebergs and ice floes in an Arctic environment, and seeks to enable the UAV to do so autonomously. This is achieved by using an occupancy grid map algorithm...
In polar region operations, drift ice positioning and tracking is useful for both scientific and safety reasons. Many sensors can be employed to generate detections of sea ice, such as satellite-carried Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and, recently, imagery equipment carried by Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). Satellite-carried SAR has the advantage of being able to cover large areas and provide consistent...
A sensitivity analysis is presented on the influence of the weight, altitude and speed of battery-powered sUAS on the resulting stall speed, endurance and range. To aid in the determination of the aircraft performance prior to flight, a method is being brought forth that quantifies the impact of these mission parameters. As a case study the P31015 sUAS is used. The P31015 is a concept model of a battery-powered...
In order to further expand the sustainability of maritime operations the use of autonomous vehicles has been employed at an increasing scale. This natural increase comes not only in the form of the multiplication of the numbers of the same vehicle model, but also in diversifying the vehicle composition setup in order to allow the exploitation of different types of payloads. Moreover, this use of heterogeneous...
This paper addresses area coverage in complex non concave coastal regions for an arbitrary number of heterogeneous Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The space is discretized with the constrained Delaunay triangulation and the Lloyd optimization is applied to the computed mesh. The paper presents an algorithm to compute a waypoint list for each UAS such that each sub-area is covered with its sensor...
One important aspect that needs to be carefully considered in maritime operations using unmanned robotic vehicles is the communication restrictions between the vehicles and the mission controller that arises mainly due to long distances and/or low power transmissions. This paper addresses the problem of maintaining a communication link between a command station and an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)...
Maritime Situational Awareness is crucial in maritime operations to identify threats and to deal with them as soon as possible. These threats can be pirates in shipping operations, icebergs when sailing in the northern sea routes, or even unknown vessels or objects that might be on the ship's path. A solution to identify these threats is the use of UAV's to overfly the ship's planned path. This solution...
Keep at hover an aerial vehicle is one of the most important task to realize when working on UAVs. Once this task is solved, the user can easily give high-orders to move the vehicle. In this paper, a nonlinear super-twisting algorithm to stabilize the nonlinear attitude of a quadcopter is presented. The controller is based on the Singular Optimal Control (SOC) and the Lyapunov theory with the sliding...
Although flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles have become a hot topic in academia, the knowledge we have of these systems, their force generation mechanisms and dynamics is still limited. Recent technological advances have allowed for the development of free flight test setups using on-board sensors and external tracking systems, for system identification purposes. Nevertheless, there is still little...
The paper reports on the energy consumption of smooth trajectories for stop-and-go navigation of aerial robots. We consider a decimeter-scale quadrotor tasked to travel on straight line, constant height trajectories from an initial hover configuration to another hover configuration. We investigate three prominent types of smooth trajectories (minimum acceleration, minimum jerk and minimum snap), and...
Recently, it was shown that an hexagon shaped hexarotor vehicle with tilted rotors, is capable of fault tolerant attitude and altitude control. In this work, we propose a strategy to select the signals commanded to each rotor in order to achieve a desired torque and vertical force. The proposed strategy is optimal in the sense that minimizes the maximum force exerted by the rotors. A comparison with...
The aim of this paper is to provide a mathematical model for a convertible unmanned aerial vehicle that combines the capabilities of a flying wing and tricopter with tilt rotors. This article presents the mathematical model for airplane and tricopter modes as well as the way they are related during the transition phase. Also is presented a control strategy to hover flying. Finally, it is presented...
The planning of an autonomous mission for UAVs requires more than the description of the points to be visited along the trajectory by which a certain task must be performed. However, the way in which such missions are planned does not provide conditions for the aircraft or the ground control system to find alternative ways of carrying out the mission, in the event of a risk or other situation different...
A two-stage optimization model for flight path planning of cooperative UAVs in formation flight in the presence of polygonal obstacles and no-fly zones is proposed. Adopting a Visibility Graph (VG) approach, the virtual formation leader plans its flight path composed of circular arcs and segments connecting obstacles vertices. Then groups of obstacles, being not permeable by the flight formation without...
In swarm robotics, the self-organization of multiagent systems which consists of a number of comparatively simple agents is an approach inspired from natural swarms. In this paper, we solve the findpath problem of n ε N agents using the principle of swarming. A Lagrangian swarm model which could navigate in a cluttered configuration space is developed. A Lyapunov like function is constructed from...
This paper addresses a path planning problem where a marsupial system is assigned to collect a specified amount of information about a set of objects of interest while minimizing the likelihood of detection by an opponent's sensor. A marsupial system consists of aircraft (agents) with different capabilities. The agents are characterized by their velocities, information collection capabilities, and...
This paper presents an optimized method to employ a team of multirotors for collecting images to generate a 3D map of an area with emphasis on special features (e.g. man-made structures) and areas of avoidance. When an area is too large to be mapped by one multirotor within its battery life, then either several flights or several multirotors need to be employed to complete the job. This paper introduces...
Unmanned networked multirobot systems have the potential to accomplish complex field tasks with minimum human intervention. Motion coordination of vehicles that operate in different domains (land, sea, air) is one of the problems that need to be addressed to achieve such a goal. This article presents a representation method based on dual quaternions for leader- follower formation control architectures...
This paper deals with the design of a consensus algorithm for a multi-aircraft (type Quadrotor) leader-follower system. This algorithm uses directed communication topologies, as well as input saturation for the follower agents. The convergence analysis of the proposed strategies is analyzed by using Lyapunov stability theory. Semi-global asymptotic consensus tracking is obtained for the case of leader...
This paper presents an approach to fault detection and isolation for a network composed by multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) flying in formation. The methodology consists on the use of a bank of unknown input observers (UIO) that runs in each UAV in order to generate a set of residual signals, that will be used to perform the detection. To this end, we consider an extended version of the unicycle...
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