Related papers: Loss of Control Prevention of an Agile Aircraft: D…

Fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer significant performance advantages over rotary-wing UAVs in terms of speed, endurance, and efficiency. However, these vehicles have traditionally been severely limited with regards to…

Safety and stability are common requirements for robotic control systems; however, designing safe, stable controllers remains difficult for nonlinear and uncertain models. We develop a model-based learning approach to synthesize robust…

Unmanned aircraft systems can perform some more dangerous and difficult missions than manned aircraft systems. In some highly complicated and changeable tasks, such as air combat, the maneuvering decision mechanism is required to sense the…

This paper studies the design of controllers for discontinuous dynamics that ensure the safety of non-smooth sets. The safe set is represented by arbitrarily nested unions and intersections of 0-superlevel sets of differentiable functions.…

A Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft is capable of short/vertical takeoffs and landings, thus eliminating the requirement of long runways. This feature makes them suitable for a broader variety of missions, generally not…

Modern control systems must operate in increasingly complex environments subject to safety constraints and input limits, and are often implemented in a hierarchical fashion with different controllers running at multiple time scales. Yet…

This paper focuses on developing a strategy for control of systems whose dynamics are almost entirely unknown. This situation arises naturally in a scenario where a system undergoes a critical failure. In that case, it is imperative to…

Machine learning techniques have demonstrated their effectiveness in achieving autonomy and optimality for nonlinear and high-dimensional dynamical systems. However, traditional black-box machine learning methods often lack formal stability…

This paper addresses the problem of risk-aware fixed-time stabilization of a class of uncertain, output-feedback nonlinear systems modeled via stochastic differential equations. First, novel classes of certificate functions, namely…

Aerocapture consists of converting a hyperbolic approach trajectory into a captured target orbit utilizing the aerodynamic forces generated via a single pass through the atmosphere. Aerocapture guidance systems must be robust to significant…

In this paper, a guidance and tracking control strategy for fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autopilots is presented. The proposed control exploits recent results on sample-based stochastic Model Predictive Control, which allow…

This paper presents a novel methodology to enforce motion safety guarantees even in the event of a sudden loss of control capabilities by any agent within a multi-agent system. This passive safety methodology permits the replacement of…

The sudden onset of deleterious and oscillatory dynamics (often called instabilities) is a known challenge in many fluid, plasma, and aerospace systems. These dynamics are difficult to address because they are nonlinear, chaotic, and are…

Stability analysis and control of linear impulsive systems is addressed in a hybrid framework, through the use of continuous-time time-varying discontinuous Lyapunov functions. Necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of impulsive…

The capture of flying MAVs (micro aerial vehicles) has garnered increasing research attention due to its intriguing challenges and promising applications. Despite recent advancements, a key limitation of existing work is that capture…

Autonomous fixed-wing flight is becoming a key capability in aerial robotics, enabling sensing, mobility, and contingency operations across both small-scale Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and large-scale Advanced Air Mobility. During unpowered…

This paper deals with a nonlinear adaptive autopilot design for agile missile systems. In advance of the autopilot design, an investigation of the agile turn maneuver, based on the trajectory optimization, is performed to determine state…

[Accepted to IROS 2025] In this paper, we address the problem of tracking high-speed agile trajectories for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs), where model inaccuracies can lead to large tracking errors. Existing Nonlinear Model Predictive…

This paper proposes an adaptive control allocation approach for uncertain over-actuated systems with actuator saturation. The proposed method does not require uncertainty estimation or a persistent excitation assumption. Using the…

This paper introduces a novel attitude controller for spacecraft subject to actuator saturation and multiple exclusion cone constraints. The proposed solution relies on a two-layer approach where the first layer prestabilizes the system…