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Chapter 1

Introduction

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 1

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Potential Applications for Small UAVs

Civil and Commercial:

  • Monitoring environment − meteorology, pollution, mapping, mineral exploration
  • Monitoring disaster areas − forest fires, avalanches, nuclear contamination
  • Communications relays − news broadcasts, disaster relief, sports events
  • Law enforcement − road traffic, border patrol, drug control
  • Precision agriculture − crop monitoring

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Military:

  • Special Operations: Situational awareness
  • Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
  • Communication node
  • Battle damage assessment

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Homeland Security:

  • Border patrol
  • Surveillance
  • Rural/urban search and rescue

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New related area:

  • Air mobility of humans, goods, services

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Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 2

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Control Design Process

The real thing

Detailed model

ODE’s, nonlinear, high order

Includes everything that is feasible to model

Hi-fi representation of real physical system behavior

Too complex for control design

ODE’s, linear, low order

May only consider a portion of dynamic behavior

Simpler to understand

Captures dominant behavior

Simulation

Model

Design

Model

Control

Design

Physical System

1st principles

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 3

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Simulation Model

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 4

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Simulation Model

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Control Design Process

The real thing

Detailed model

ODE’s, nonlinear, high order

Includes everything that is feasible to model

Hi-fi representation of real physical system behavior

Too complex for control design

ODE’s, linear, low order

May only consider a portion of dynamic behavior

Simpler to understand

Captures dominant behavior

Simulation

Model

Design

Model

Control

Design

Physical System

1st principles

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 6

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Design Model

Course from aileron transfer function:

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 7

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Control Design

Design model

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 8

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Control Design Process

The real thing

Detailed model

ODE’s, nonlinear, high order

Includes everything that is feasible to model

Hi-fi representation of real physical system behavior

Too complex for control design

ODE’s, linear, low order

May only consider a portion of dynamic behavior

Simpler to understand

Captures dominant behavior

Simulation

Model

Design

Model

Control

Design

Physical System

1st principles

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 9

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Control Design Process

Design

Model

Control

Design

Step 1:

Linear, low-order model

Control design and system model implemented in software

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 10

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Control Design Process

Step 2:

Detailed system model

Control design and system model implemented in software

Simulation

Model

Control

Design

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 11

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Control Design Process

Control

Design

Physical System

Step 3:

Real system hardware

Control design implemented in software

software

hardware

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 12

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Architecture

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 13

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Architecture w/ Camera

Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 14

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Course Project Ideas

  • Implement autopilot components on hardware using ROSflight, PixHawk, or another autopilot
  • Develop learning modules for the African Drone and Data Academy in Malawi (e.g., Jupyter notebooks)
  • Integrate our course simulator into the AirSim simulator (https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim)
  • Extend existing autopilot components to do something in a different way (e.g., perform path following using MPC)
  • Extend existing autopilot to do something new (e.g., use machine vision to land on a target)
  • Something of your own creation that builds on the concepts of this course

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Beard & McLain, “Small Unmanned Aircraft,” Princeton University Press, 2012 Chapter 1: Slide 15