In this paper, we describe trajectory planning and state estimation algorithms for aggressive flight of micro aerial vehicles in known, obstacledense environments. Finding aggressive but dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories in cluttered environments requires trajectory optimization and state estimation in the full state space of the vehicle, which is usually computationally infe...

Automatic obstacle detection and avoidance is a key component for the success of micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) in the future. As the payload of MAVs is highly constrained, cameras are attractive sensors because they are both lightweight and provide rich information about the environment. In this paper, we present an approach that allows a quadrotor with a single monocular camera to locally gener...

The objective of this work is to study and compare nonlinear attitude estimation methods to be used for a quadrotor state estimation and control. We begin by introducing the QuavIST quadrotor Unamnned Aerial Vehile (UAV) platform, alongside with the mathematical equations that govern the aircraft motion in flight. The nonlinear equations of motion are linearized about an operating point, and fi...

This thesis presents two distinct bodies of work concerning quadrotor flight in urban wind fields. The first attempts to characterize a quadrotor's ability to exploit urban wind fields for improved flight performance. A computational fluid dynamics model is used to obtain a wind field estimate given a 3D model of the environment and a prevailing wind estimate. Minimum-energy trajectories are th...

This paper investigates an Adaptive Fuzzy GainsScheduling Integral Sliding Mode Controller (AFGS-ISMC) design approach to deal with the attitude and altitude stabilization problem of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) precisely of a quadrotor. The Integral Sliding Mode Control (ISMC) seems to be an adequate control tool to remedy this problem. The selection of the controller parameters is done m...

Recent miniaturization of computer hardware, MEMs sensors, and high energy density batteries have enabled highly capable mobile robots to become available at low cost. This has driven the rapid expansion of interest in multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles. Another area which has expanded simultaneously is small powerful computers, in the form of smartphones, which nearly always have a camera at...

Quadrotors are coming up as an attractive platform for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research, due to the simplicity of their structure and maintenance, their ability to hover, and their vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capability. With the vast advancements in small-size sensors, actuators and processors, researches are now focusing on developing mini UAV’s to be used in both research and ...

The past decade has seen an increased interest in Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Rotary wing MAVs such as quadrotors, can operate in confined spaces, hover at any given point in space and perch or land on a flat surface. This makes the quadrotor a very attractive aerial platform with tremendous potential. Our main goal was to design and prototype an MAV that weighs less than 30g and i...