Gergely Regula

Control of an experimental mini quad-rotor UAV

The design and the initial realization of control on an experimental in-door unmanned autonomous quadrotor helicopter is presented. This is a hierarchical embedded model-based control scheme that is built upon the concept of back-stepping, and is applied on an electric motor-driven quadrotor UAV hardware that is equipped with an embedded on-board computer, inertial sensor unit, as well as facilities that make it suitable to be involved in an in-door positioning system, and wireless digital communication network. This realization forms an important step in the development process of a more advanced realization of an UAV suitable for practical applications; it aims clarification of the control principles, acquiring experience in solving control tasks, and getting skills for the development of further realizations.

Design and hardware-in-the-loop test of the embedded control system of an indoor quadrotor helicopter

The paper deals with the quick prototype design and hardware-in-the-loop real-time test of the embedded control system of an indoor miniature quadrotor helicopter (UAV) before first flight. The control law is of backstepping type, the sensory system consists of a marker-based vision system outside the helicopter in radio connection with the embedded controller and a 3D inertial measurement unit (IMU) on the helicopter. Extended Kalman filters solve the state estimation problem. Brushless DC motors serve as actuators. For quick prototype design of the embedded controller MATLAB, Simulink, Real-Time Workshop and the MPC555 Target Compiler were used. Because of the critical character of the control of flying systems the whole embedded control system was hardware-in-the-loop tested by using DS1103 of dSPACE for real-time emulation of the indoor helicopter. During test the helicopter and the sensors were mapped to DS1103 and the test was performed in real-time using the helicopter and sensor models. Communication during the test was running using CAN bus protocol between the Freescale MPC555 processor of the embedded controller and the emulation of the helicopter and the sensors on DS1103.

Formation control of a large group of UAVs with safe path planning

In this article we propose a hierarchical control structure for multi-agent systems. The main objective is to perform formation change manoeuvres, with guaranteed safe distance between each two vehicles throughout the whole mission, even if motion is restricted to a limited space and static obstacles are present. The key components that ensure safety are a robust control algorithm that is capable of stabilising the group of vehicles in a desired formation and a higher level path generation method that provides all the vehicles with safe paths, based on graph theoretic considerations. The method can efficiently handle a large group of any type of vehicles. As an illustration, the results are applied to a group of 18 quadrotor UAVs, where 2 of the UAVs cannot receive information from the others.

Formation control of a large group of UAVs with safe path planning and obstacle avoidance

In this article we propose a hierarchical control structure for multi-agent systems. The main objective is to perform formation change manoeuvres, with guaranteed safe distance between each two vehicles throughout the whole mission, even if motion is restricted to a limited space and static obstacles are present. The key components that ensure safety are a robust control algorithm that is capable of stabilising the group of vehicles in a desired formation and a higher level path generation method that provides all the vehicles with safe paths, based on graph theoretic considerations. The method can efficiently handle a large group of any type of vehicles. As an illustration, the results are applied to a group of 18 quadrotor UAVs, where 2 of the UAVs cannot receive information from the others.