Rocío Muñoz

BENCHMARK CONTROL PROBLEMS FOR A NON-LINEAR UNDERACTUATED HOVERCRAFT: A SIMULATION LABORATORY FOR CONTROL TESTING

Abstract Hovercrafts are a type of vehicles with a structure model similar to marine vehicles. These systems are strongly non-linear so their dynamics are complex. The problems of motion control can be classified in three groups: point stabilization, trajectory tracking and path following. From a pedagogical point of view it is difficult to study the behaviour of this type of vehicles using only static graphs. In order to understand the dynamics of these vehicles it is necessary to use interactive dynamic simulations. This paper shows a simulation environment used as a laboratory to design, analyze and test controllers for the three benchmark control problems for the model of a radio control hovercraft with the possibility of implementing the designs obtained in the real system.

Quantized-State control of a hovercraft with discrete inputs

Abstract The In this work the quantized state control QSC methodology has been applied to the tracking control problem of a Hovercraft with discrete control inputs. Firstly a continuous control law for the hovercraft with continuous inputs is designed. Then this controller is adapted to the discontinuous inputs by using a PWM strategy. Finally the QSC methodology is introduced. This paper shows that the control effort and number of computations in the controller can be reduced by the QSC strategy without loss of performance.

Interactive Generation of Plant Templates for Robust Control

This paper gives a general description of template interactive generator (TIG), a free software tool which calculates the templates boundaries of plants with special parameter dependencies, such as interval plants; and plants with affine parametric uncertainty. TIG can also find the template boundaries associated with other kinds of plants whose templates have been previously computed in Matlab. Besides, several examples are included to illustrate the use of this software tool.

DISCRETE EVENT BASED APPROACH TO THE SIMULATION OF A CONTINUOUS NAVAL SYSTEM

Abstract In this work a simulation platform for uninhabited marine and aerial vehicles is proposed. This platform is based in the MDA (Model Driven Architecture) approach and the DEVS (Discrete Event System Specification) formalism. Platform independent models (PIM) are used to describe the vehicles and its interaction; then, theses models are traduced to platform-specific models (PSMs) in Matlab-Simulink, Java and other languages. DEVS formalism is designed to describe discrete events model, so in order to use continuous time models the second order quantified states simulation (QSS2) is proposed. This method is applied to an autonomous radio controlled hovercraft and its low level tracking controller.