This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomou...

This paper presents our solution for enabling a quadrotor helicopter, equipped with a laser rangefinder sensor, to autonomously explore and map unstructured and unknown indoor environments. While these capabilities are already commodities on ground vehicles, air vehicles seeking the same performance face unique challenges. In this paper, we describe the difficulties in achieving fully autonomou...

This work presents a direct approximate-adaptive control, using CMAC nonlinear approximators, for an experimental prototype quadrotor helicopter. The method updates adaptive parameters, the CMAC weights, as to achieve both adaptation to unknown payloads and robustness to disturbances. Previously proposed weight-update methods, such as e-modification, provide robustness by simply limiting weight...

This paper considers the problem of attitude sensor fault diagnosis in a quadrotor helicopter. The proposed approach is composed of two stages. The first one is the modelling of the system attitude dynamics taking into account the induced communication constraints. Then a robust fault detection and evaluation scheme is proposed using a post-filter designed under a particular design objective. T...

In this paper, the relationship between attitude and linear acceleration of the quadrotor unmanned mini-helicopter is built and two trajectory tracking control design methodologies based on the relationship are proposed: classical inner/outer-loop control design approach and a new command filtered backstepping design strategy. Various numerical simulations demonstrate the validity of the contro...

Reliable depth estimation is important to many autonomous robotic systems and visual control algorithms. The Microsoft Kinect is a new, low cost game controller peripheral that calculates a depth map of the environment with good accuracy and high rate. In this paper we use the calibrated output of the depth sensor to obtain an accurate absolute depth map. Subsequently by using a Randomized Houg...

Abstract—In this work a dynamic model of a new quadrotor aerial vehicle that is equipped with a tilt-wing mechanism is presented. The vehicle has the capabilities of vertical take-off/landing (VTOL) like a helicopter and flying horizontal like an airplane. Dynamic model of the vehicle is derived both for vertical and horizontal flight modes using Newton-Euler formulation. An LQR controller for ...

Despite the significant progress in micro and information technologies and all the interest of the scientific community in the Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV), fully autonomous micro-helicopters of the size of a small bird are still not available. The Mesicopter group at Stanford University [1] studied the feasibility of a centimeter scale quadrotor. The group of Prof. Nonami at Chiba University [2...

The control of complex nonlinear systems can be aided by modeling each system as a collection of simplified hybrid modes, with each mode representing a particular operating regime defined by the system dynamics or by a region of the state space in which the system operates. Guarantees on the safety and performance of such hybrid systems can still be challenging to generate, however. Reachabilit...

The dynamics of a quadrotor are a simplified form of helicopter dynamics that exhibit the same basic problems of underactuation, strong coupling, multi-input/multi-output design, and unknown nonlinearities. Control design for the quadrotor is more tractable yet reveals corresponding approaches for helicopter and UAV control design. In this paper, a backstepping approach is used for quadrotor co...