Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

by Valavanis, Kimon P.

• ISBN13: 9781402061134
• ISBN10: 1402061137
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-30
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

There has been tremendous emphasis in unmanned aerial vehicles, both of fixed (airplanes) and rotary wing (vertical take off and landing, helicopters) types over the past ten years. Applications span both civilian and military domains, the latter being the most important at this stage.This edited book provides a solid and diversified reference source related to basic, applied research and development on small and miniature unmanned aerial vehicles, both fixed and rotary wing. As such, the book offers background information on the evolution of such vehicles over the years, followed by modeling and control fundamentals that are of paramount importance due to unmanned aerial vehicle model complexity, nonlinearity, coupling, inhirent instability and parameter values uncertainty. Aspects of navigation, including visual-based navigation and target tracking are discussed, followed by applications to attitude estimation on micro unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous solar unmanned aerial vehicle, biomimetic sensing for autonomous flights in near-earth environments, localization of air-ground wireless sensor networks, decentralized formation tracking, design of an unmanned aerial vehicle for volcanic gas sampling and design of an on-board processing controller for miniature helicopters.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xiii
List of Contributing Authors	p. xvii
Background Information
Introduction	p. 3
A Historical Perspective on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles	p. 15
Modeling and Control Fundamentals
Airplane Basic Equations of Motion and Open-Loop Dynamics	p. 49
Control Fundamentals of Small/Miniature Helicopters: A Survey	p. 73
A Tutorial Approach to Small Unmanned Helicopter Controller Design for Non-aggressive Flights	p. 119
Design and Control of a Miniature Quadrotor	p. 171
Navigation Aspects
Obstacle and Terrain Avoidance for Miniature Aerial Vehicles	p. 213
Vision Based Navigation and Target Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles	p. 245
Single and Multi-UAV Relative Position Estimation Based on Natural Landmarks	p. 267
Evolutionary Algorithm Based Path Planning for Multiple UAV Cooperation	p. 309
Applications
Robust Nonlinear Observers for Attitude Estimation of Mini UAVs	p. 343
Autonomous Solar UAV for Sustainable Flights	p. 377
The Integration of a Multimodal MAV and Biomimetic Sensing for Autonomous Flights in Near-Earth Environments	p. 407
Dynamic Localization of Air-Ground Wireless Sensor Networks	p. 431
Decentralized Formation Tracking of Multi-Vehicle Systems with Consensus-Based Controllers	p. 455
"Hardware in the Loop" Tuning for a Volcanic Gas Sampling UAV	p. 473
A Modular On-board Processing System for Small Unmanned Vehicles	p. 495
Epilogue
Conclusions and the Road Ahead	p. 533
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.