Autonomous ship deck landing of a quadrotor using invariant ellipsoid method

Abstract

This paper proposes an invariant ellipsoid-based method for the controller design and gain synthesis of a low-cost quadrotor autonomous ship deck landing system subjected to wind disturbance and measurement noise. This method optimizes the quadrotor performance, hence achieving soft landing. A complete control architecture for the quadrotor is also presented. Simulations are performed using a realistic ship deck model in the presence of measurement noise and wind disturbance with a quadrotor. has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, where he is currently an associate professor. His research interest includes multiagent systems, vision-based control systems, robust and reliable control, path planning and trajectory generation, and flight control systems. Yew Chai Paw received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Nanyang Technology University, Singapore, in 2000 and 2005, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering in 2009 from University of Minnesota, MN. He is currently a principal member of technical staff in DSO National Laboratories, Singapore. His research interests include UAV system engineering and flight dynamics modeling. Fang Liao received her B.E. and M.E. degrees in control and navigation, both from

Shipboard Landing Control Enabled by an Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator

“…When the quadrotor is close enough to the landing platform, the final phase (touchdown) is initiated by decreasing the thrust at a constant rate. For the selection of the landing trajectory, in [21], a smooth sigmoid function is used as the reference path to achieve the smooth landing. The reference path in [4] is an exponential function, which is specified by the desired optical-flow divergence.…”

“…In [25], a modified Prony analysis procedure is used to estimate the mean ship deck height. Nevertheless, the ship motion estimator requires substantial time to initialize [21], and the motion control accuracy is also dependent on the performance of the ship motion estimator [4]. This motivates researchers to investigate the second category of estimator-free methods, where the effects of the random ship motions are treated as disturbances.…”

“…This motivates researchers to investigate the second category of estimator-free methods, where the effects of the random ship motions are treated as disturbances. In [21], an altitude controller for a quadrotor based on the invariant ellipsoid technique is developed to handle the ship heave motion. The optimal control gain is computed to achieve the minimum ellipsoid size, which is also the error response bound.…”

Saturated adaptive sliding mode control for autonomous vessel landing of a quadrotor

“…In this case, autonomous landing task on the vessel is crucial for the quadrotor. Meanwhile, it is also challenging to perform autonomous vessel landing because of pseudorandom vessel motion caused by tanglesome wave interaction [4]. Besides, the time‐varying disturbances from the airflow and the ocean currents are unpredictable [5].…”

“…Optimisation approach has been utilised in automatic carrier landing system [8] as well, the authors presented a novel method based on simplified brain storm optimisation algorithm to optimise the control parameters. Other landing methods include vision‐guided landing methods [9, 10], parameters optimisation algorithm [11, 12], and invariant ellipsoid method [4].…”