Vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) systems have become a crucial component of aeronautical and commercial applications alike. Quadcopter systems are rather convenient to analyze and design controllers for, owing to symmetry in body dynamics. In this work, a quadcopter model at hover equilibrium is derived, using both high and low level control. The low level control system is designed to track reference Euler angles (roll, pitch and yaw) as shown in previous work [1],[2]. The high level control is designed to track reference X, Y, and Z axis states [3]. The objective of this paper is to model, design and simulate platooning (separation) control for a fleet of 6 quadcopter units, each comprising of high and low level control systems, using a leader-follower approach. The primary motivation of this research is to examine the ”accordion effect”, a phenomenon observed in leader-follower systems due to which positioning or spacing errors arise in follower vehicles due to sudden changes in lead vehicle velocity. It is proposed that the accordion effect occurs when lead vehicle information is not directly communicated with the rest of the system [4][5] . In this paper, the effect of leader acceleration feedback is observed for the quadcopter platoon. This is performed by first designing a classical platoon controller for a nominal case, where communication within the system is purely ad-hoc (i.e from one quadcopter to it’s immediate successor in the fleet). Steady state separation/positioning errors for each member of the fleet are observed and documented during simulation. Following this analysis, lead vehicle acceleration is provided to the controller (as a feed forward term), to observe the extent of it’s effect on steady state separation, specifically along tight maneuvers. Thus the key contribution of this work is a controller that stabilizes a platoon of quadcopters in the presence of the accordion effect, when employing a leader-follower approach. The modeling shown in this paper builds on previous research to design a low costquadcopter platform, the Mark 3 copter [1]. Prior to each simulation, model nonlinearities and hardware constants are measured or derived from the Mark 3 model, in an effort to observe the working of the system in the presence of realistic hardware constraints. The system is designed in compliance with Robot Operating System (ROS) and the Micro Air Vehicle Link (MAVLINK) communication protocol.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in many applications because of their small size, great mobility and hover performance. This has been a consequence of the fast development of electronics, cheap lightweight flight controllers for accurate positioning and cameras. This thesis describes modeling, control and design of an oblique-cross-quadcopter platform for indoor-environments.

One contribution of the work was the design of a new printed-circuit-board (PCB) flight controller (called MARK3). Key features/capabilities are as follows:

(1) a Teensy 3.2 microcontroller with 168MHz overclock –used for communications, full-state estimation and inner-outer loop hierarchical rate-angle-speed-position control,

(2) an on-board MEMS inertial-measurement-unit (IMU) which includes an LSM303D (3DOF-accelerometer and magnetometer), an L3GD20 (3DOF-gyroscope) and a BMP180 (barometer) for attitude estimation (barometer/magnetometer not used),

(3) 6 pulse-width-modulator (PWM) output pins supports up to 6 rotors

(4) 8 PWM input pins support up to 8-channel 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver for manual control,

(5) 2 5V servo extension outputs for other requirements (e.g. gimbals),

(6) 2 universal-asynchronous-receiver-transmitter (UART) serial ports - used by flight controller to process data from Xbee; can be used for accepting outer-loop position commands from NVIDIA TX2 (future work),

(7) 1 I2C-serial-protocol two-wire port for additional modules (used to read data from IMU at 400 Hz),

(8) a 20-pin port for Xbee telemetry module connection; permits Xbee transceiver on desktop PC to send position/attitude commands to Xbee transceiver on quadcopter.

The quadcopter platform consists of the new MARK3 PCB Flight Controller, an ATG-250 carbon-fiber frame (250 mm), a DJI Snail propulsion-system (brushless-three-phase-motor, electronic-speed-controller (ESC) and propeller), an HTC VIVE Tracker and RadioLink R9DS 9-Channel 2.4GHz Receiver. This platform is completely compatible with the HTC VIVE Tracking System (HVTS) which has 7ms latency, submillimeter accuracy and a much lower price compared to other millimeter-level tracking systems.

The thesis describes nonlinear and linear modeling of the quadcopter’s 6DOF rigid-body dynamics and brushless-motor-actuator dynamics. These are used for hierarchical-classical-control-law development near hover. The HVTS was used to demonstrate precision hover-control and path-following. Simulation and measured flight-data are shown to be similar. This work provides a foundation for future precision multi-quadcopter formation-flight-control.

In this dissertation, we present a H-infinity based multivariable control design methodology that can be used to systematically address design specifications at distinct feedback loop-breaking points. It is well understood that for multivariable systems, obtaining good/acceptable closed loop properties at one loop-breaking point does not mean the same at another. This is especially true for multivariable systems that are ill-conditioned (having high condition number and/or relative gain array and/or scaled condition number). We analyze the tradeoffs involved in shaping closed loop properties at these distinct loop-breaking points and illustrate through examples the existence of pareto optimal points associated with them. Further, we study the limitations and tradeoffs associated with shaping the properties in the presence of right half plane poles/zeros, limited available bandwidth and peak time-domain constraints. To address the above tradeoffs, we present a methodology for designing multiobjective constrained H-infinity based controllers, called Generalized Mixed Sensitivity (GMS), to effectively and efficiently shape properties at distinct loop-breaking points. The methodology accommodates a broad class of convex frequency- and time-domain design specifications. This is accomplished by exploiting the Youla-Jabr-Bongiorno-Kucera parameterization that transforms the nonlinear problem in the controller to an affine one in the Youla et al. parameter. Basis parameters that result in efficient approximation (using lesser number of basis terms) of the infinite-dimensional parameter are studied. Three state-of-the-art subgradient-based non-differentiable constrained convex optimization solvers, namely Analytic Center Cutting Plane Method (ACCPM), Kelley's CPM and SolvOpt are implemented and compared.

The above approach is used to design controllers for and tradeoff between several control properties of longitudinal dynamics of 3-DOF Hypersonic vehicle model -– one that is unstable, non-minimum phase and possesses significant coupling between channels. A hierarchical inner-outer loop control architecture is used to exploit additional feedback information in order to significantly help in making reasonable tradeoffs between properties at distinct loop-breaking points. The methodology is shown to generate very good designs –- designs that would be difficult to obtain without our presented methodology. Critical control tradeoffs associated are studied and compared with other design methods (e.g., classically motivated, standard mixed sensitivity) to further illustrate its power and transparency.

Toward the ambitious long-term goal of a fleet of cooperating Flexible Autonomous Machines operating in an uncertain Environment (FAME), this thesis addresses various control objectives for ground vehicles.

There are two main objectives within this thesis, first is the use of visual information to control a Differential-Drive Thunder Tumbler (DDTT) mobile robot and second is the solution to a minimum time optimal control problem for the robot around a racetrack.

One method to do the first objective is by using the Position Based Visual Servoing (PBVS) approach in which a camera looks at a target and the position of the target with respect to the camera is estimated; once this is done the robot can drive towards a desired position (x_ref, z_ref). Another method is called Image Based Visual Servoing (IBVS), in which the pixel coordinates (u,v) of markers/dots placed on an object are driven towards the desired pixel coordinates (u_ref, v_ref) of the corresponding markers.

By doing this, the mobile robot gets closer to a desired pose (x_ref, z_ref, theta_ref).

For the second objective, a camera-based and noncamera-based (v,theta) cruise-control systems are used for the solution of the minimum time problem. To set up the minimum time problem, optimal control theory is used. Then a direct method is implemented by discretizing states and controls of the system. Finally, the solution is obtained by modeling the problem in AMPL and submitting to the nonlinear optimization solver KNITRO. Simulation and experimental results are presented.

The DDTT-vehicle used within this thesis has different components as summarized below:

(1) magnetic wheel-encoders/IMU for inner-loop speed-control and outer-loop directional control,

(2) Arduino Uno microcontroller-board for encoder-based inner-loop speed-control and encoder-IMU-based outer-loop cruise-directional-control,

(3) Arduino motor-shield for inner-loop speed-control,

(4) Raspberry Pi II computer-board for outer-loop vision-based cruise-position-directional-control,

(5) Raspberry Pi 5MP camera for outer-loop cruise-position-directional control.

Hardware demonstrations shown in this thesis are summarized: (1) PBVS without pan camera, (2) PBVS with pan camera, (3) IBVS with 1 marker/dot, (4) IBVS with 2 markers, (5) IBVS with 3 markers, (6) camera and (7) noncamera-based (v,theta) cruise control system for the minimum time problem.

This thesis addresses the design and control of three phase inverters. Such inverters are

used to produce three-phase sinusoidal voltages and currents from a DC source. They

are critical for injecting power from renewable energy sources into the grid. This is

especially true since many of these sources of energy are DC sources (e.g. solar

photovoltaic) or need to be stored in DC batteries because they are intermittent (e.g. wind

and solar). Two classes of inverters are examined in this thesis. A control-centric design

procedure is presented for each class. The first class of inverters is simple in that they

consist of three decoupled subsystems. Such inverters are characterized by no mutual

inductance between the three phases. As such, no multivariable coupling is present and

decentralized single-input single-output (SISO) control theory suffices to generate

acceptable control designs. For this class of inverters several families of controllers are

addressed in order to examine command following as well as input disturbance and noise

attenuation specifications. The goal here is to illuminate fundamental tradeoffs. Such

tradeoffs include an improvement in the in-band command following and output

disturbance attenuation versus a deterioration in out-of-band noise attenuation.

A fundamental deficiency associated with such inverters is their large size. This can be

remedied by designing a smaller core. This naturally leads to the second class of inverters

considered in this work. These inverters are characterized by significant mutual

inductances and multivariable coupling. As such, SISO control theory is generally not

adequate and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) theory becomes essential for

controlling these inverters.

Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers are a versatile category of controllers that are commonly used in the industry as control systems due to the ease of their implementation and low cost. One problem that continues to intrigue control designers is the matter of finding a good combination of the three parameters - P, I and D of these controllers so that system stability and optimum performance is achieved. Also, a certain amount of robustness to the process is expected from the PID controllers. In the past, many different methods for tuning PID parameters have been developed. Some notable techniques are the Ziegler-Nichols, Cohen-Coon, Astrom methods etc. For all these techniques, a simple limitation remained with the fact that for a particular system, there can be only one set of tuned parameters; i.e. there are no degrees of freedom involved to readjust the parameters for a given system to achieve, for instance, higher bandwidth. Another limitation in most cases is where a controller is designed in continuous time then converted into discrete-time for computer implementation. The drawback of this method is that some robustness due to phase and gain margin is lost in the process. In this work a method of tuning PID controllers using a loop-shaping approach has been developed where the bandwidth of the system can be chosen within an acceptable range. The loop-shaping is done against a Glover-McFarlane type ℋ∞ controller which is widely accepted as a robust control design method. The numerical computations are carried out entirely in discrete-time so there is no loss of robustness due to conversion and approximations near Nyquist frequencies. Some extra degrees of freedom owing to choice of bandwidth and capability of choosing loop-shapes are also involved and are discussed in detail. Finally, comparisons of this method against existing techniques for tuning PID controllers both in continuous and in discrete-time are shown. The results tell us that our design performs well for loop-shapes that are achievable through a PID controller.