Publications by authors named "Sarquis Urzua"

To obtain autonomy in applications that involve Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the capacity of self-location and perception of the operational environment is a fundamental requirement. To this effect, GPS represents the typical solution for determining the position of a UAV operating in outdoor and open environments. On the other hand, GPS cannot be a reliable solution for a different kind of environments like cluttered and indoor ones.

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This work presents a method for estimating the model parameters of multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles by means of an extended Kalman filter. Different from test-bed based identification methods, the proposed approach estimates all the model parameters of a multi-rotor aerial vehicle, using a single online estimation process that integrates measurements that can be obtained directly from onboard sensors commonly available in this kind of UAV. In order to develop the proposed method, the observability property of the system is investigated by means of a nonlinear observability analysis.

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This work presents a novel approach for estimating the Solow-Cobb-Douglas economic growth model. In this case, an Extended Kalman Filter is used for estimating, at the same time, the time-varying parameters of the model and the system state, from subsets of partially available economic data measurements. Different from traditional econometric techniques, the proposed EKF approach is applied directly to a state-space representation of the original nonlinear model, where all the model parameters are treated as time-varying parameters.

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In recent years, many researchers have addressed the issue of making Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) more and more autonomous. In this context, the state estimation of the vehicle position is a fundamental necessity for any application involving autonomy. However, the problem of position estimation could not be solved in some scenarios, even when a GPS signal is available, for instance, an application requiring performing precision manoeuvres in a complex environment.

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The present paper describes a vision-based simultaneous localization and mapping system to be applied to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The main contribution of this work is to propose a novel estimator relying on an Extended Kalman Filter. The estimator is designed in order to fuse the measurements obtained from: (i) an orientation sensor (AHRS); (ii) a position sensor (GPS); and (iii) a monocular camera.

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