Development of flapping wing robot and vision-based obstacle avoidance strategy.

Due to the flight characteristics such as small size, low noise, and high efficiency, studies on flapping wing robots are being actively conducted. In particular, the flapping wing robot is in the spotlight in the field of search and reconnaissance. Most of the research focuses on the development of flapping wing robots rather than autonomous flight.

Finite-Time Continuous Nonsingular Terminal Modified Adaptive-Gain Super-Twisting Control: Application to a 2-DOF Planar Robot Manipulator System.

This article proposes finite-time continuous nonsingular terminal modified adaptive-gain super-twisting control (FT-CNT-MAG-STC) for the second-order disturbed systems. Compared with existing sliding-mode controllers, the noteworthy improvements of the proposed framework are the fast finite-time convergence, continuous control signal, ease-of-implementation feature, and relaxation of the assumption related to the information on the bounds of the disturbance and its derivative. In the proposed framework, a fast nonsingular terminal sliding surface is first developed such that the singularity problem is avoided and the convergence rate is improved.

Heterogeneous mission planning for a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with attention-based deep reinforcement learning.

Large-scale and complex mission environments require unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deal with various types of missions while considering their operational and dynamic constraints. This article proposes a deep learning-based heterogeneous mission planning algorithm for a single UAV. We first formulate a heterogeneous mission planning problem as a vehicle routing problem (VRP).

Enhanced location tracking in sensor fusion-assisted virtual reality micro-manipulation environments.

Virtual reality (VR) technology plays a significant role in many biomedical applications. These VR scenarios increase the valuable experience of tasks requiring great accuracy with human subjects. Unfortunately, commercial VR controllers have large positioning errors in a micro-manipulation task.

A modified generic second order algorithm with fixed-time stability.

This paper introduces a modified second order sliding mode algorithm with fixed-time stability analysis based on the Lyapunov function approach. An existing second order sliding mode algorithm is generalized, which provides superior features on convergence rate, accuracy, and robustness against a class of perturbations. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with existing algorithms through designing observers first.

Prescribed performance adaptive finite-time control for uncertain horizontal platform systems.

This paper presents a new approach to the design of prescribed performance adaptive control for uncertain horizontal platform systems with the finite-time convergence. Following an appropriate performance function and error transformation, a new adaptive control law is proposed by using a novel integral non-singular terminal sliding mode surface. The proposed approach simultaneously guarantees that (i) the transient responses of the closed-loop system possess some advanced properties such as the existence of the prespecified lower bound of the convergence rate and of the pre-established upper bound of the maximum overshoot; and (ii) the finite-time convergence of the state trajectories/tracking errors to zero.

Experimental Validation of Gaussian Process-Based Air-to-Ground Communication Quality Prediction in Urban Environments.

This paper presents a detailed experimental assessment of Gaussian Process (GP) regression for air-to-ground communication channel prediction for relay missions in urban environment. Considering restrictions from outdoor urban flight experiments, a way to simulate complex urban environments at an indoor room scale is introduced. Since water significantly absorbs wireless communication signal, water containers are utilized to replace buildings in a real-world city.

Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance Strategies for MAVs Using Optical Flows in 3-D Textured Environments.

Due to payload restrictions for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs), vision-based approaches have been widely studied with their light weight characteristics and cost effectiveness. In particular, optical flow-based obstacle avoidance has proven to be one of the most efficient methods in terms of obstacle avoidance capabilities and computational load; however, existing approaches do not consider 3-D complex environments. In addition, most approaches are unable to deal with situations where there are wall-like frontal obstacles.