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Electronics
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Design and Applications of Aerial Robotics
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Design and Applications of Aerial Robotics

A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Systems & Control Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2022) | Viewed by 6237

Special Issue Editors

Dr. M. Hasan Shaheed

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Guest Editor
School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
Interests: robotics; aerial robotics; control; renewable energy technology
Prof. Dr. Mohammad Osman Tokhi

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Engineering, London South Bank University, London SE1 0AA, UK
Interests: active noise and vibration control; adaptive/intelligent control; soft-computing modeling and control of dynamic systems; assistive robotics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Dr. Stephen Adira Agha

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Guest Editor
Department of Engineering and Mathematics, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK
Interests: aerial robotics; renewable energy systems; non-linear control; capsule endoscopes

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The last two decades have witnessed a drastic maturing and widespread availability of the components and technologies required for aerial robotics. This has led to an unprecedented level of increase in the useful and challenging applications of aerial robotics, which include filming, precision agriculture, leakage detection in different pipe networks, electrical power-grid monitoring, environment monitoring, traffic monitoring, and wildlife monitoring. The efficient and cost-effective use of aerial robots in these applications demands application-oriented specific designs and control approaches. Moreover, some limitations to the full acceptance and utilization of aerial robotics still exist, including flight endurance and energy autonomy, frameworks for safe operation beyond the line of visual sight in a built-up environment, navigation in an unstructured environment, etc. Mission success of aerial robots largely depends on the soundness and suitability of the overall design and system configurations, the reliability of the components and subsystems, as well as the robustness of their control systems.

This Special Issue will focus on aerial robots’ design, model development, optimization (including bioinspired), automatic control, and applications. This will encompass all aerial robot configurations, energy systems, and methods of propulsion. Both real-time implementation and simulation work will be covered.

Dr. M. Hasan Shaheed
Prof. Dr. M. Osman Tokhi
Dr. Stephen Adira Agha
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Aerial robotics
  • Unmanned aerial vehicles
  • Fixed-wing
  • Rotary-wing
  • Quadrotor
  • Design
  • Dynamic modelling
  • Control
  • Powering
  • Renewable energy-based powering
  • Hybrid powering
  • Model-based control
  • AI and machine learning-based control
  • Structural optimization
  • Performance optimization
  • Simulation
  • Experimental verification

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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19 pages, 5504 KiB  
Article
Optimised Sliding Mode Control of a Hexacopter: Simulation and Experiments
by Chaoran Sun, Stephen A. Agha, Zaharuddin Mohamed and M. Hasan Shaheed
Electronics 2022, 11(16), 2519; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11162519 - 11 Aug 2022
Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2764
Abstract
Hexacopters are a kind of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with six actuators and six degrees-of-freedom motions. The control of a hexacopter drone is a critical challenge. This paper presents a nonlinear dynamical model for a hexacopter and complete control approaches based on sliding [...] Read more.
Hexacopters are a kind of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with six actuators and six degrees-of-freedom motions. The control of a hexacopter drone is a critical challenge. This paper presents a nonlinear dynamical model for a hexacopter and complete control approaches based on sliding mode control theory. Furthermore, this study proposed an effective control tuning method based on an optimisation algorithm. The controller has been improved by the grey wolf optimisation (GWO) algorithm, an iteration algorithm inspired by the social hierarchy and hunting behaviour of grey wolves. The improvement of the controller has been verified both experimentally and in simulations. The performance of the sub-controller for an attitude angle was tested in a test bench, and the whole flight controller was tested in simulation hexacopters, which are highly manoeuvrable, nonlinear aerial vehicles with six independent rotors and capacity for vertical take-off and landing. This article presents a derivation of the nonlinear dynamical model for a hexacopter, which includes the aerodynamic drag, and inertia counter torques. Flight control based on sliding mode control theory, which generally shows good performance on nonlinear systems, is developed and implemented. Given the need to simultaneously tune controller parameters, two nature inspired optimisation routines (GWO and PSO) are applied and compared for effectiveness in controller tuning. Results indicate that GWO-based tuning produces superior outcomes in terms of controller performance. This is in addition to the fact that PSO parameters require tuning rather than random selection of algorithm parameters. A reduced-order physical prototype is presented for the validation of the tuning routine on the roll/pitch control. The results indicate good agreement between simulation and experimental outcomes, with about 10.4% improvement in the tracking performance of roll DOF when GWO is applied to tune the controller. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Design and Applications of Aerial Robotics)
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26 pages, 67209 KiB  
Article
Robust Nonlinear Tracking Control for Unmanned Aircraft in the Presence of Wake Vortex
by Petr Kazarin, Vladimir Golubev, William MacKunis and Claudia Moreno
Electronics 2021, 10(16), 1890; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10161890 - 6 Aug 2021
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2477
Abstract
The flight trajectory of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be significantly affected by external disturbances such as turbulence, upstream wake vortices, or wind gusts. These effects present challenges for UAV flight safety. Hence, addressing these challenges is of critical importance for the integration [...] Read more.
The flight trajectory of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be significantly affected by external disturbances such as turbulence, upstream wake vortices, or wind gusts. These effects present challenges for UAV flight safety. Hence, addressing these challenges is of critical importance for the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS), especially in terminal zones. This work presents a robust nonlinear control method that has been designed to achieve roll/yaw regulation in the presence of unmodeled external disturbances and system nonlinearities. The data from NASA-conducted airport experimental measurements as well as high-fidelity Large Eddy Simulations of the wake vortex are used in the study. Side-by-side simulation comparisons between the robust nonlinear control law and both linear H∞ and PID control laws are provided for completeness. These simulations are focused on applications involving small UAV affected by the wake vortex disturbance in the vicinity of the ground (which models the take-off or landing phase) as well as in the out-of-ground zone. The results demonstrate the capability of the proposed nonlinear controller to asymptotically reject wake vortex disturbance in the presence of the nonlinearities in the system (i.e., parametric variations, unmodeled, time-varying disturbances). Further, the nonlinear controller is designed with a computationally efficient structure without the need for the complex calculations or function approximators in the control loop. Such a structure is motivated by UAV applications where onboard computational resources are limited. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Design and Applications of Aerial Robotics)
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