Modeling, identification and navigation of autonomous air vehicles
During the last few years Unmanned Air Vehicles have seen a widespread utilization, both in civilian and military scenarios, because of the benefits of replacing the human presence in unsuitable or hostile environments and dangerous or dull tasks. Examples of their use are surveillance, firefighting, rescuing, extreme photography and environmental monitoring.
The main interest of this work is autonomous navigation of such air vehicles, specifically quadrotor helicopters (quadrocopters), and the focus is on convergence to a target destination with collision avoidance. The main contribution is the design of a controller for convergence and avoidance of static obstacles, based both on considerations on the dynamics of the agent and knowledge of the testbed for the experiments. The controller is composed of a layered structure. The external layer consists in the computation of a collision-free path leading to the target position and is based on a navigation function approach. The inner layer is meant to make the vehicle follow the waypoints imposed by the outer layer and thus consists in a position controller.
Matteo Vanin
Matteo Vanin's Master's Thesis (pdf 9.9 MB)