Sharif Digital Repository

The purpose of this thesis is to control altitude and attitude of a Tilt Tri-Rotor UAV in rotorcraft mode and control of altitude, attitude and forward velocity in transition mode (from rotorcraft mode to cruise) by using model predictive control. First, the detailed mathematical model is obtained by the Newton-Euler equations of motion, in both rotorcraft and transition modes. In the next step, a MIMO model predictive controller has been designed, considering input constraints. Then, since, robustness of the model-based control approach is an important challenge, the performance of the controller is presented in the presence of model uncertainties and wind disturbances. The results indicate... 

The purpose of this thesis is to control the attitude of a tail-sitter UAV in transition phase (from hover to cruise and vice versa). This UAV has a pusher shrouded fan propulsive. Due to the fact that in transition phase the dynamic model of the UAV is associated with a significant uncertainties and the stability is more important than the performance, robust controller has been used. The propulsion part of the tail-sitter UAV can be assumed as a separate ducted fan UAV. In the first step both UAVs have been designed. then, in order to have an accurate model of UAV, the dynamics of actuators, including the engine and servo motor, has been identified. Then, modeling and verification for both... 

In recent years, autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted considerable amount of interest because of a wide area of applications and a lot of advantages. UAVs have been extensively used for military operations that include tracking, surveillance, active engagement with weapons and airborne data acquisition. UAVs are also in demand commercially due to their advantages in comparison to manned vehicles. These advantages include lower manufacturing and operating costs, flexibility in configuration depending on customer request and not risking the pilot on demanding missions. Quadrotor, which is a kind of rotary wing UAVs, has many advantages such as the vertical take-off and... 

In this study, in order to enhance the accuracy of tracking repetitive maneuvers in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), an educable control scheme is proposed. At the outset, the controller is designed based on the sliding mode control (SMC) technique. In addition, the offline PD-type memory-based iterative learning control (ILC) is used along with SMC. In ILC scheme, the error of states is saved during the maneuvers that will be used in the subsequent iteration. Also, in order to increase flexibility of the new control structure, ILC-SMC, a multilayer perceptron has been developed. This network is designed to extend the control signal, generated by ILC, to similar maneuvers. The presented... 

This thesis focuses on the development of a flight formation control algorithm and obstacle avoidance of a UAV team using fuzzy predictive artificial potential field (FPAPF) method. One of the common methods for path generation and obstacle avoidance is the artificial potential field (APF) method. The basis of the APF method is that the UAV is attracted to the target point and repelled from the obstacles by using the potential fields of attraction and repulsion. The popularity of this method is due to its computational simplicity and efficiency. The APF method has limitations due to constant attraction and repulsion coefficients. The proposed real-time FPAPF method uses fuzzy logic to... 

UAV routing algorithms, correct modeling of battery life is very important, which can be done by dynamically integrating the UAV with routing. A drone must visit a set of targets, although after reaching a predetermined distance from the target, the drone must adjust its flight mode for loading (delivery) and after delivery must complete the escape maneuver. And prepare for the next delivery. Routing and optimization factors should be combined to ensure the safety of the vehicle and the feasibility (route feasibility). Research and studies that have been done in this field, have solved the problems by considering the exact time and also less attention to the energy limitations of these... 

Inspection of confined corridors is one of the important and necessary topics in various industries, including mines, oil and gas industries. Human inspection is very time-consuming and expensive due to the difficulty of accessing these environment, and in some corridors, it is not possible to inspect at all. In this thesis, UAV guidance and navigation algorithms have been developed by using informations got from optical flow, inertial and ultrasonic sensors, so that the UAV can fly automatically inside the confined corridor without colliding the boundaries. At first, a model of the space around the corridor, UAV and its subsystems has been proposed so that we can use it to create a... 

In this study, integrated navigation systems that utilize velocity-matching algorithm and are used in automatic landing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are investigated. At first, the accuracy of the navigation system in the landing phase is analyzed and the relationship between the accuracy of inertial sensors, flight parameters and the accuracy of the navigation system is derived analytically. Then, by integrating the dynamic model of the UAV and the inertial measurement unit, a new algorithm for navigation of fixed-wing UAVs is presented. The integration mechanism of the proposed algorithm is tightly coupled; hence, it is capable to eliminate the errors of UAV model and inertial system.... 

In this research work, the concept of an unmanned aerial firefighting system with water thrusters has been studied. This system consists of a platform head, a waterhose and a ground pump. The concept is briefly to pump water through the hose and then fall it down on fire from the platform. This conceptual system may have many other applications. The other applications have also been addressed in the introduction section. This platform can be considered as an unmanned aerial vehicle whose lift and control forces is provided by water thrusters. The conceptual study has been carried out based on three subjects of preliminary sizing, system dynamic modeling and controller design for platform... 

The last-mile delivery is one of the most challenging problems in supply chain management. In recent years, many studies addressed last-mile delivery and investigated vehicle synchronization to serve customers. The speed and flexibility of drones and the transportation capacity of trucks attracted the attention of researchers to investigate the synchronizing problem of these vehicles. However, most previous works assumed fixed locations for customers, which may not be accurate in real-world environments. The goal of this research is to addresses a more realistic problem, in which customer movements and mobile locations are considered for the first time. A mixed-integer mathematical... 

The use of drones in various fields is increasing. One of the applications that can be mentioned for drones is humanitarian areas can include drug supply chains, blood supply chains, relief chains, and the like. The use of these unmanned vehicles in humanitarian areas poses legal challenges compared to other areas. This study aimed to investigate drones following a disaster, the essential role of UAVs, and a vehicle to carry out relief operations. Following a disaster, infrastructure can be severely damaged, and the destruction of infrastructure can reduce the efficiency of land vehicles. In this research, “drone and vehicle routing problem” have been done to provide relief and minimize the... 

The rapid growth of e-commerce and home delivery has increased the number of vehicles on the streets. As a result of that, traffic congestion and, in return, air pollution have got worse. To prevent this trend, using electric vehicles is highly suggested, and in recent years, some companies have started using autonomous delivery robots. Since these robots can travel for a limited time, it is better to use them in conjunction with other vehicles, like vans. In this research, we propose a mixed-integer programming model to formulate a two-echelon time-dependent vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pick-up and delivery. In the first echelon, vans travel from a central depot to parking and... 

Over the past two decades, the production of ultra-light drones has increased dramatically. These aircraft are used in applications such as filming, surveying, etc. One of the most important goals is to fly them for a long time. From time immemorial, a lot of work has been done to get such birds to fly, but nothing has ever been done on their engines and propellers, and they have always been considered ideal models (in other words, their efficiency is a bit ideal). In this dissertation, the main purpose is to study some of these sets and to obtain the flight time of a particular drone. First, a low-velocity wind tunnel was built to examine these complexes, then we tested these complexes... 

In this study, an effective collective control strategy is presented for the decentralized behavior control of a heterogeneous multi–cluster swarm robotic system composed of a group of quadrotors as aerial agents, and a group of two–wheeled mobile robots as ground agents. In this regard, first of all, a new element for swarm robotic systems is introduced. This element, which is made up of a portion of swarm members and encircles the whole swarm, is called the shell element. An algorithm for developing the shell element in swarm robotic systems composed of agents moving in the two–dimensional space is established. Subsequently, inspired by the thermodynamic science and based on the introduced... 

Quadcopters are a bunch of vertical takeoff and landing UAVs and generally consist of four symmetric arms, each possessing a rotor-blade at the end. Quadcopters are able to retain their state and position by performing static maneuverability. Conventional quadcopters have less actuators (four engines) than their DOF (six degrees of freedom in the space). Thus, it is impossible to control all DOF of the system independently. Nevertheless, one can make a solution to this problem by increasing the number of actuators, so that each rotor-blade can also rotate about the corresponding arm. Such a quadcopter is so called a “tilt-rotor quadcopter”. The aim of this work is to model a tilt-rotor... 

Using unmanned aerial vehicles in aerial payload carrying leads many changes requiring significant study and research. In recent years, there has been considerable maturation in Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) developement especially quadcopters. In addition to the endurance restriction, considerations on volume and weight that can be carried, and safety issues are also obstacles to the development of unmanned aerial payload carrying in urban environments. One of the ways to make a quadcopter more agile while carrying a load is to hang the cargo from the quadcopter via a cable. In this way, it is possible that quadcopters carry the cargo in a cooperative way, which if properly arranged,... 

In this study, the cooperative inertial navigation systems are used to prevent the error growth of the inertial navigation system in unmanned aerial vehicles that fly in group. Here, the navigation problem is defined for a group of unmanned vehicles, flying with full six degrees of freedom and the objective is to estimate the navigation information of all cooperators. Due to the nonlinear equations, the decentralized extended Kalman filter is used to estimate the states of the system. This means that there is a Kalman filter in each vehicle. The inputs of this filter are the range and the bearing angles between the vehicle and the cooperators, the estimated position of the cooperators and... 

The purpose of this thesis is to design and implement a controller for a Ducted-Fan in the landing and take-off phase using a linear quadratic tuning method based on differential game theory. This is a control method with a robust control approach and tries to see all the disturbances and unmodulated dynamics in the form of the second actor and produce a control command according to the worst behavior of the second actor. For this purpose, 6 DOF Ducted-Fan have been modeled. then The proposed controller is designed for a linearized model around the hover point. In the next step, the performance of the proposed controller is compared with the SlidingMode Controller. Also, the parameters of... 

As the leading kind of multi-rotors, quadrotors have become one of the most popular Unmanned Areal Vehicles (UAVs). These robots are very agile, but their speed is limited when performing decent maneuvers. In this project, a special quadrotor with dihedral-rotating arms is presented in order to increase the decent velocity of the vehicle. The conceptual and detailed designs of the vehicle are presented first, followed by the construction of the quadrotor. The fabricated quadrotor measures 25 cm in size, has a weight of about 1 kg, and can support up to 70 degrees of dihedral angle. Afterwards, the dynamic equations of the dihedral quadrotor are driven and simulated. The effects of dihedral... 

In recent years, the area of research on micro flying robots has been developed due to the development in micro manufacturing technologies. Due to extra advantages of these flying robots, they are implemented in military and civilian missions such as identifying, espionage, aerial relays, traffic surveillance, rescue, aid, etc. Ability to fly in specified areas, without human injuries, low manufacturing and energy costs, easy and fast implementation, Easy Maintenance, etc, which are some advantages of these robots. We can control these robots manually by remote controllers (RC) or by Auto guidance systems. On the other hand, these robots are used in research laboratories for testing new...