This paper presents an initial study of the autopilot development of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The USV named Springer is being developed to carry out pollutant tracking, and environmental and hydrographic surveys in rivers, reservoirs, inland waterways and coastal waters, particularly where shallow waters prevail. The catamaran shaped autonomous vessel is modelled as a two input, singl...

This paper describes experiments in applying inductive learning to the task of acquiring a complex motor skill by observing human subjects. A flight simulation program has been modified to log the actions of a human subject as he or she flies an aircraft. The log file is used to create the input to an induction program. The output from the induction program is tested by running the simulator in...

This paper presents the development and preliminary results of a rapidly reconfigurable autopilot for small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. The autopilot presented differs from current commercial and open source autopilots mainly as it has been designed to: (i) be easily reprogrammable via Simulink (models are directly transferred to the autopilot through the Real-Time Workshop’s code-generation capa...

In this paper a course-keeping autopilot for a containership designed with fuzzy logic theory is presented. The autopilot control strategy is deduced heuristically by exploiting expert knowledge and is implemented by means of fuzzy logic. In order to facilitate analytical analysis of the closed loop system non-linear control theory is used to guide the choice of control structure. An interpreta...

The need for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is very interesting nowadays. Autonomous UAVs provide the possibility of performing tasks and missions that are currently hazardous or can cost humans or money, enable autonomous search, persistent combat intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and many other applications. This paper presents an overview of autopilot design wi...

In this paper, the authors tried to design the altitude hold mode autopilot for unmanned aerial vehicles. This case presents an interesting challenge attributable to the nonminimum phase characteristic, nonlinearities, and uncertainties of the altitude to elevator relationship. A fuzzy logic autopilot in a single-loop scheme is proposed for the design of this autopilot. The multiobjective genet...

The missile autopilot was designed using linear parameter-varying (LPV) control techniques. The controller provides exponential stability guarantee and performance bound in terms of induced L2 norm for the missile plant. The systematic gain-scheduling approach is motivated by the recent development in LPV control theory and provides a well founded and systematic procedure for high performance m...

By P. K. Menon and E. J. Ohlmeyer Abstract Recent threat assessments by the US Navy have indicated the need for improving the accuracy of defensive missiles. This objective can only be achieved by enhancing the performance of the missile subsystems and by finding methods to exploit the synergism existing between subsystems. As a first step towards the development of integrated design methodolog...

The dynamic characteristics of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) present a control problem that classical methods cannot often accommodate easily. Fundamentally, AUV dynamics are highly non-linear, and the relative similarity between the linear and angular velocities about each degree of freedom means that control schemes employed within other flight vehicles are not always applicable. In s...