Modeling and adaptive control of indoor unmanned aerial vehicles

The operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in constrained indoor environments presents many unique challenges in control and planning. This thesis investigates modeling, adaptive control and trajectory optimization methods as applied to indoor autonomous flight vehicles in both a theoretical and experimental context. Three types of small-scale UAVs, including a custom-built three-wing tailsitter, are combined with a motion capture system and ground computer network to form a testbed capable of indoor autonomous flight. An L1 adaptive output feedback control design process is presented in which control parameters are systematically determined based on intuitive desired performance and robustness metrics set by the designer. Flight test results using a quadrotor helicopter demonstrate that designer specifications correspond to the expected physical responses. Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) L1 adaptive control is applied to a three-wing tailsitter. An inner-loop body rate adaptation structure is used to bypass the non-linearities of the closed-loop system, producing an adaptive architecture that is invariant to the choice of baseline controller. Simulations and flight experiments confirm that the MIMO adaptive augmentation effectively recovers nominal reference performance of the vehicle in the presence of substantial physical actuator failures. A method for developing a low-fidelity model of propeller-driven UAVs is presented and compared to data collected from flight hardware.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Michini, Bernard (Bernard J.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan P. How.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54619

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54619