The concept of multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) cooperatively performing a mission offers several advantages over single vehicles working in a non-cooperative manner such as increased efficiency, performance, reconfigurability, robustness and the emergence of new capabilities. This paper introduces the concept of coordinated path-following control of multiple AUVs. The vehicles ar...

in this paper, a nonlinear model of the underactuated six degrees of freedom (6 dof) quadrotor helicopter was derived based on the newton-euler formalism. a new nonlinear robust control strategy was proposed to solve the stabilizing and path following problems in presence of external disturbances and parametric uncertainties. the proposed control structure consist of a sliding mode control base...

In path-following the control objective is to force the output to follow a geometric path without a timing law assigned to it. We highlight a fundamental difference between the path-following and the standard reference-tracking by demonstrating that performance limitation due to unstable zero-dynamics can be removed in the path-following problem.

This paper addresses the problem of marine vehicle path following using innerouter loop control, with due account for the vehicle dynamics. We propose an inner-outer control structure that lends itself to a simple intuitive interpretation and exhibits three key advantages: i) it allows for decoupling in the design of the inner and outer control loops, ii) the design of the outer loop controller...

In this paper we present a path-following (homotopy) method for (locally) solving bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) problems in control. The method is to linearize the BMI using a first order perturbation approximation, and then iteratively compute a perturbation that “slightly” improves the controller performance by solving a semidefinite program (SDP). This process is repeated until the desire...

This paper describes the problem of designing control laws for path following robots, including two types of nonholonomic mobile manipulators. Due to a cascade structure of the motion equation, a backstepping procedure is used to achieve motion along a desired path. The control algorithm consists of two simultaneously working controllers: the kinematic controller, solving motion constraints, an...

The main objectives of this work are the development of simulation models and the synthesis of controllers for path following, in the scope of mobile robotics. The mathematical model of the mobile robot is nonlinear and subject to a set of constraints at the inputs of the system, as well as in its states. Therefore, hybrid control techniques integrated in a model predictive control strategy are...

This paper addresses the problem of path following for mobile robots with particular emphasis on integrating the global path planning, path following and a collision avoidance scheme in a unified framework. Whereas the traditional path following algorithms aim at minimizing an error function with respect to a given path and kinematic and/or dynamic model of the robot, the problem of collision a...

A methodology is provided to tackle the path-following integrated guidance and control problem for unmanned air vehicles with measured outputs available at different rates. The path-following problem is addressed by defining a suitable non-linear path dependent error space to express the vehicle’s nonlinear dynamics. The main novelty of the method is to explicitly take into account the differen...