Guidance and Control of autonomous vehicles under large environmental forces
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Background
Algorithms used in guidance often originate from the missile community, which is characterized by small, agile objects that move very fast. When applying the same algorithms to slow vehicles that are more affected by the environment, such as fixed-wing UAVs and wave-propelled surface vessesls (Alberto Dallolio 2021), some of the theoretical assumptions fall apart. This results in poor performance.
Autonomous vehicles are sometimes divided into a low-level autopilot, and a higher-level guidance computer. For many systems, the low-level autopilot runs PX4 or Ardupilot software, and relies on MAVLink to communicate with the higher-level computer. This requires the internal data in both computers to be translated into MAVLink before being sent to the other, where it is translated again. However, with the introduction of ROS2, which is built on top of a Real Time Publish Subscribe protocol in the Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard, it is possible to communicate more directly between ROS2 and PX4.
Scope
The goal of this project is to improve the performance, in terms of minimal cross-track error, for guidance of vehicles in slow speeds or large environmental forces. A secondary goal is to investigate the use of the RTPS protocol to communicate between the guidance computer and the autopilot.
The focus is proposed to be on fixed-wing UAVs.
Proposed tasks
- Investigate state of the art algorithms for guidance of autonomous vehicles, such as (Park, Deyst, and How 2007), (Fossen 2011), (Lekkas and Fossen 2014), (Fossen and Pettersen 2014), (Borhaug, Pavlov, and Pettersen 2008), where an important aspect to understand is the difference between course and heading guidance.
- Perform a litterature review of guidance in large environmental forces, such as wind and/or current.
- Propose a guidance controller for the selected platform, e.g. UAV.
- Implement the guidance controller, test it in simulations, and compare to the state-of-the-art
- Conclude the work in a written report
Prerequisites
This is a list of recommended prerequisites, more to signal what it will involve than to be used as a filter on candidates.
- Strong background in rigid body dynamics, such as TTK4190 Guidance and Control of Vehicles and TTK4130 Modelling and Simulation
- Good knowledge of programming and the Linux command line.
Contact
Contact supervisors Kristoffer Gryte for more information.
References
Alberto Dallolio, Jo A. Alfredsen, Henning Øveraas. 2021. “Design and Validation of a Course Control System for a Wave-Propelled Unmanned Surface Vehicle.” Field Robotics, 1–26.
Borhaug, Even, Alexey Pavlov, and Kristin Y Pettersen. 2008. “Integral LOS Control for Path Following of Underactuated Marine Surface Vessels in the Presence of Constant Ocean Currents.” In Decision and Control, 2008. CDC 2008. 47th IEEE Conference on, 4984–91. IEEE.
Fossen, Thor I. 2011. Handbook of Marine Craft Hydrodynamics and Motion Control. John Wiley & Sons.
Fossen, Thor I., and Kristin Y. Pettersen. 2014. “On Uniform Semiglobal Exponential Stability (USGES) of Proportional Line-of-Sight Guidance Laws.” Automatica 50 (11): 2912–7.
Lekkas, Anastasios M, and Thor I Fossen. 2014. “Integral LOS Path Following for Curved Paths Based on a Monotone Cubic Hermite Spline Parametrization.” IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology 22 (6): 2287–2301.
Park, Sanghyuk, John Deyst, and Jonathan P How. 2007. “Performance and Lyapunov Stability of a Nonlinear Path Following Guidance Method.” Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics 30 (6): 1718–28.