AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE CONTROL

DESCRIPTION

The engineering of autonomous vehicles is now beginning to be one of the major fields in aerospace engineering, as the ever-increasing computational power of onboard computers allows for more and more potential applications, both civil and military, to become feasible.

However, usually the flight control systems for these vehicles are designed to be very conservative, and cannot exploit all of the capabilities of the vehicle. The motion is very close to some equilibrium point (hover for helicopters, for example), and generally is very slow. Human pilots, on the other hand, can accomplish very aggressive maneuvers, even with the limited sensory input that is available to a RC pilot.

The goal of the project is
• to understand what aggressive maneuvering means in this context
• to define a methodology for control system design that allows for aggressive maneuvering, while at the same time maintain some performance and stability guarantees

Pictures and more details to come...

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Feron, E.

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

Emilio Frazzoli (frazzoli@mit.edu)

LINKS

Aerial Robotics Home Page

FRONT PAGE * AERO/ASTRO * MIT * FEEDBACK

Submitted by Emilio Frazzoli on April 8, 1997