Emil Fresk

A Generalized Reduced-Complexity Inertial Navigation System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, a generic approach to attitude and position estimation, suited for any type of unmanned aerial vehicle, is presented. This will be achieved by establishing a generic framework, which can be extended using adaptive methods to determine the thrust properties of the engines and the mass of the aircraft, while keeping the overall computational complexity of the system low. Furthermore, the effect of magnetic disturbances will be reduced in a novel way by confining the magnetic errors to affect only heading, without compromising the pitch and roll estimation of the system with error-based estimation. The efficacy of the proposed framework will be evaluated through extended simulations and experimental validations on a multirotor. Finally, guidelines will be provided toward: 1) an implementation with a reduced computational complexity and 2) the utilization of the square-root formulations of the extended Kalman filter for extending the dynamic range of the filter.

Experimental model derivation and control of a variable pitch propeller equipped quadrotor

The aim of this article is to present a novel quaternion based control scheme for the attitude control problem of a quadrotor equipped with variable pitch propellers. A variable pitch propeller is a type of propeller system utilizes a mechanical mechanism to change the pitch of the rotor blades, while when applied to quadrotors it results in an over-actuated control system. The novelty of the article stems from: a) the proposal of an experimental model for variable pitch propellers and b) the novel proposed thrust and power consumption optimizations for the over-actuated quadrotor. Throughout the article, the merits of the proposed novel approach are being analyzed and discussed, while the efficiency of the variable pitch propellers are being evaluated by extended simulation and experimental results.

Cooperative UAVs as a Tool for Aerial Inspection of the Aging Infrastructure.

This article presents an aerial tool towards the autonomous cooperative coverage and inspection of a 3D infrastructure using multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In the presented approach the UAVs are relying only on their onboard computer and sensory system, deployed for inspection of the 3D structure. In this application each agent covers a different part of the scene autonomously, while avoiding collisions. The visual information collected from the aerial team is collaboratively processed to create the 3D model. The performance of the overall setup has been experimentally evaluated in a realistic outdoor infrastructure inspection experiments, providing sparse and dense 3D reconstruction of the inspected structures.

Reduced complexity calibration of MEMS IMUs

In this article a reduced complexity calibration method for Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) will be presented, which does not need the rotating reference tables, commonly used in the gyroscope calibration. As it will be presented, in the proposed novel scheme fixed angle rotations have been utilized to observe the integral of the gyroscope signals to find the corresponding sensitivity, axis misalignment and acceleration sensitivity matrices. This appraoch has the significant merit of high norm accuracy, easiness of use, low cost and simplicity in construction, thus allowing anyone with a basic electronics knowledge to calibrate an IMU.

Design, modelling and control of a Single Rotor UAV

In this article, a novel Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) Single Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (SR-UAV) will be presented. The SRUAVs design properties will be analysed in detail, with respect to technical novelties outlining the merits of such a conceptual approach. The systems model will be mathematically formulated, while a cascaded P-PI and PID-based control structure will be utilized in extensive simulation trials for the preliminary evaluation of the SR-UAVs attitude and translational performance.

Abstract timers and their implementation onto the ARM Cortex-M family of MCUs

Real-Time For the Masses (RTFM) is a set of languages and tools being developed to facilitate embedded software development and provide highly efficient implementations geared to static verification. The RTFM-kernel is an architecture designed to provide highly efficient and predicable Stack Resource Policy based scheduling, targeting bare metal (single-core) platforms. We contribute by introducing a platform independent timer abstraction that relies on existing RTFM-kernel primitives. We develop two alternative implementations for the ARM Cortex-M family of MCUs: a generic implementation, using the ARM defined SysTick/DWT hardware; and a target specific implementation, using the match compare/free running timers. While sacrificing generality, the latter is more flexible and may reduce overall overhead. Invariants for correctness are presented, and methods to static and run-time verification are discussed. Overhead is bound and characterized. In both cases the critical section from release time to dispatch is less than 2us on a 100MHz MCU. Queue and timer mechanisms are directly implemented in the RTFM-core language (-core in the following) and can be included in system-wide scheduling analysis.

Optimal design and modeling of a tilt wing aircraft

The aim of this article is to present an optimal model for the behavior of a tilt wing aircraft during its transition state. A tilt wing aircraft is a hybrid between a helicopter and a plane, which has the capabilities of both parts, meaning that it can stand still and hover and by tilting its wing 90 degrees to act like a regular plane. Overall, a tilt wing aircraft has the extended merits of vertical take offs and landings, to stand still and hover in mid air, while being able to travel in long distances efficiently. The novelty of this article stems from: a) the analysis of the aircraft during the transition between helicopter mode and plane for the angles between 0-90 degrees, b) the comparison between the model extracted from the simulations and tests from a wind tunnel for the wing, and c) the proposal for an optimal design for a tilt wing UAV. The efficiency of the proposed modeling approach has been evaluated in multiple simulated and experimental verification.

Experimental evaluation of a full quaternion based attitude quadrotor controller

The aim of this article is to present a novel quaternion based control scheme for the attitude control problem of a quadrotor and experimentally evaluate its performance. A quaternion is a hyper complex number of rank 4 that can be utilized to avoid the inherent geometrical singularity when representing rigid body dynamics with Euler angles or the complexity of having coupled differential equations with the Direction Cosine Matrix (DCM). In the presented approach the novel contributions consist of: a) the quadrotors attitude model and b) the proposed non-linear Proportional squared (P2) control algorithm, which have been proposed and experimentally evaluated fully in the quaternion space, without any transformations nor calculations in the Euler angle nor the DCM spaces. The established control scheme is combined with a quaternion based Madwick Complementary filter for estimating the attitude quadrotors responses. Multiple experimental results, including the case where external disturbances are acting on the quadrotor, are being presented for proving the efficiency and the robustness of the proposed novel quaternion based controller.

Generalized center of gravity compensation for multirotors with application to aerial manipulation

The aim of this paper is to establish a generalized parameter estimation scheme to online estimate the Center of Gravity (COG) for multirotors, while using a geometric controller to perform position tracking for applications in aerial manipulation. The proposed scheme is developed so the controller uses the estimated COG to compensate and remove constant offset in the position tracking. The efficiency and validity of the proposed parameter estimation and compensation scheme is proved through two experimental evaluations, one when step changes to the COG are applied and one tracking experiment where a compact aerial manipulator is attached to the multirotor and performs sweeping motions.

Frame induced vibration estimation and attenuation scheme on a multirotor helicopter

The aim of this article is to establish an induced frame vibration and attenuation scheme, specifically targeting the area of multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), such as quadrotors. These types of unmanned small scale helicopters are characterized by small and light frames, which are vulnerable to vibrations induced by the operation of the motors or external environmental factors. The existence of such vibrations effecting the frame can significantly deteriorate the performance of the overall closed system and even drive it to instabilities. In this article spectral estimation schemes based on: a) Autoregressive (AR) modeling and b) Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) are being established and evaluated towards their ability to detect the induced vibration frequencies on the UAV, while an extended discussion is being presented on selecting the correct number of the identified induced vibrating frequencies. In a sequential stage, a vibration attenuation approach based on notch filtering is being presented, being able to correctly attenuate the induced vibrating frequencies in the measurements. The efficiency of the overall suggested scheme is being evaluated by experimental results that indicate the significant improvement in the measurements achieved by the direct application of the proposed scheme.