Control Approaches for Thrust-Propelled Underactuated Vehicles and their application to VTOL drones

Tarek Hamel (University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France)

DATE: 2009-10-29
TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: RSISE Seminar Room, ground floor, building 115, cnr. North and Daley Roads, ANU

ABSTRACT:
In this talk I will present a synthesis of some control approaches for a class of underactuated vehicles. I will present then a generic method, we recently developed, which exploits the common structure of actuation of under actuated vehicle in order to stabilize reference trajectories either in thrust direction, velocity, or position. The basic modeling assumption is that the vehicle is propulsed via a thrust force along a single body-fixed direction and that it has full torque actuation for attitude control (i.e. a typical actuation structure for aircrafts, Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles, submarines, etc.).

Additional assumptions on the external forces applied to the vehicle are also introduced for the sake of control design and stability analyses. They are best satisfied for vehicles which are subjected to an external force field (e.g. gravity) and whose shape induces lift forces with limited amplitude, unlike airplanes but as in the case of many VTOL drones.

Some experimental and simulation results are presented to illustrate the applicability of some control strategies.

BIO:
Tarek Hamel received his Bachelor of Engineering from the Institut d'Electronique et d'Automatique d'Annaba, Algeria, in 1991. He conducted his Ph.D. research at the Laboratoire Heuristique et Diagnostic des systèmes complexes de Compiègne, France, and received his doctorate degree in Robotics from the University of Technologie of Compiègne in 1996. After two years as a research assistant at the University of Technology of Compiègne, he joined the Centre d'Etudes de Mécanique d'Iles de France in 1997 as an assistant professor. In 2001/2002 he spent one year as CNRS researcher at the Heudiasyc Laboratory. Since 2003, he has been a Professor at the I3S UNSA-CNRS laboratory of the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis, France. His research interests include control theory and robotics with particular focus on nonlinear control, vision-based control and complementary filtering. He is involved in applications of these techniques to the control of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Mobile Robots.

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