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With UAVs promising capabilities to increase operation flexibility and reduce mission cost, we are exploiting the automated carrier-landing performance advancement that can be achieved by fixed-wing UAVs. To demonstrate such potentials, in…

This paper presents a nonlinear integrated guidance and control (IGC) approach for flexible leader-follower formation flight of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) while accounting for high-fidelity aerodynamics and thrust dynamics.…

This paper addresses the problem of designing a trajectory tracking control law for a quadrotor UAV, subsequent to complete failure of a single rotor. The control design problem considers the reduced state space which excludes the angular…

The spacecraft attitude tracking problem is addressed with actuator faults and uncertainties among inertias, external disturbances, and, in particular, state estimates. A continuous sliding mode attitude controller is designed using…

This paper presents the development of a sliding mode controller using the backstepping approach. The controller is employed to synthesize tracking errors and Lyapunov functions. A novel state-space representation is formulated by…

This paper provides a preliminary study for an efficient learning algorithm by reasoning the error from first principle physics to generate learning signals in near real time. Motivated by iterative learning control (ILC), this learning…

This paper proposes a solution to the attitude tracking problem for a novel quadrotor tailsitter unmanned aerial vehicle called swiveling biplane quadrotor. The proposed vehicle design addresses the lack of yaw control authority in…

A tracking controller for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is developed to track moving targets undergoing unknown translational and rotational motions. The main challenges are to control both the relative positions and angles between the…

Attitude control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a difficult control problem in part due to uncertain nonlinear dynamics, actuator constraints, and coupled longitudinal and lateral motions. Current state-of-the-art…

In this research, we investigated the innovative use of a manipulator as a tail in quadruped robots to augment their physical capabilities. Previous studies have primarily focused on enhancing various abilities by attaching robotic tails…

This paper presents a solution for the state estimation and control problems for a class of unconventional vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAVs operating in forward-flight conditions. A tightly-coupled state estimation approach is used…

Autopilot systems are typically composed of an "inner loop" providing stability and control, while an "outer loop" is responsible for mission-level objectives, e.g. way-point navigation. Autopilot systems for UAVs are predominately…

Aerial manipulator, which is composed of an UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and a multi-link manipulator and can perform aerial manipulation, has shown great potential of applications. However, dynamic coupling between the UAV and the…

This paper addresses the trajectory tracking control problem for underactuated VTOL UAVs. According to the different actuation mechanisms, the most common UAV platforms can achieve only a partial decoupling of attitude and position tasks.…

Although acrobatic flight control has been studied extensively, one key limitation of the existing methods is that they are usually restricted to specific maneuver tasks and cannot change flight pattern parameters online. In this work, we…

This paper presents a learning-based tracking control framework for cooperative transport of a rigid payload by multiple aerial manipulators under rigid grasp constraints. A unified geometric model is developed, yielding a coupled…

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become standard tools in reconnaissance and surveying for both civilian and defense applications. In the future, UAVs will likely play a pivotal role in autonomous package delivery, but current…

This work addresses the problem of path tracking control of a suspended load using a tilt-rotor UAV. The main challenge in controlling this kind of system arises from the dynamic behavior imposed by the load, which is usually coupled to the…

Tail-sitter vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the capability of hovering and performing efficient level flight with compact mechanical structures. We present a unified controller design for such UAVs,…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved unprecedented successes in a range of challenging problems, their applicability has been mainly limited to simulation or game domains due to the high sample complexity of the…