The presented research concerns the control of unmanned vehicles. The results introduced in this dissertation provide a solid control framework for a wide class of nonlinear uncertain systems, with a special emphasis on issues related to implementation, such as control input amplitude and rate saturation, or partial state measurements availability. More specifically, an adaptive control framewo...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a viable alternative to manned aircraft and satellites for a variety of applications, including environmental monitoring, agriculture, and surveying. They promise greater precision and much lower operating costs than traditional methods. Critical to the success of UAV systems is the auto-pilot system which keeps the vehicle in the air and in control in the ab...

We consider active gyroscopic stabilization of unstable bodies such as two-wheeled monorails, twowheeled cars, or unmanned bicycles. It has been speculated that gyroscopically stabilized monorail cars would have economic advantages with respect to birail cars, enabling the cars to take sharper curves and traverse steeper terrain, with lower installation and maintenance costs. A two-wheeled, gyr...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being deployed in a vast variety of military, civilian, industrial and agricultural applications. Dynamics modeling is an essential step towards designing autonomous controllers for UAV systems. The dynamics modeling on the other hand requires accurate records of the UAVs motion states during real flight tests. This is usually achieved using Inertial Measurem...

As autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles are deployed on the roads, they will have to eventually start communicating with each other in order to achieve increased efficiency and safety. Current approaches in the control of collaborative vehicles primarily consider homogeneous simplified vehicle dynamics and usually ignore any communication issues. This raises an important question of how syste...

This work presents a novel framework for the formation control of multiple autonomous ground vehicles in an on-road environment. Unique challenges of this problem lie in 1) the design of collision avoidance strategies with obstacles and with other vehicles in a highly structured environment, 2) dynamic reconfiguration of the formation to handle different task specifications. In this paper, we d...

Hydrogen has emerged as a possible transportation fuel for addressing long-term, sustainable energy supply, security, and environmental problems. Yet, there are a number of barriers that need to be overcome if hydrogen vehicles are ever to penetrate transportation markets, not the least of which is the development of a vehicle–infrastructure system. Hydrogen vehicles and refueling infrastructur...

Abstract: The paper studies the problem of finite time formation control for multiple vehicles based on the motion planning approach. The vehicle is modeled as the full actuated rigid body with the dynamics evolving on the tangent bundle of Euclidean group, both the formation time which is finite and the geometric structure of the formation are assumed to be specified by the task. For the requi...

We consider a formation of vehicles moving on the two dimensional plane. The movement of each vehicle is described by a system of ordinary differential equations with inputs. The formation is maintained using autonomous controls that are designed to maintain fixed relative distances and orientations between vehicles. Moreover this formation should track a given trajectory on the plane. The vehi...

This paper provides an overview of the latest advances in road vehicle suspension design, dynamics, and control, together with the authors' perspectives, in the context of vehicle ride, handling and stability. The general aspects of road vehicle suspension dynamics and design are discussed, followed by descriptions of road roughness excitations with a particular emphasis on road potholes. Passi...