Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tan, Ruoyu
Language:English
Published: University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1378194694
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spelling ndltd-OhioLink-oai-etd.ohiolink.edu-ucin13781946942021-08-03T06:19:39Z Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Tan, Ruoyu Mechanical Engineering Unmanned Air Vehicle quadrotor UAV multicopter Proportional Navigation Trajectory Generation An Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft without a human pilot on board. It can be controlled either autonomously by computers onboard, or using a remote control by a pilot on the ground, or in another vehicle. In both military and civilian sectors, UAVs are quickly obtaining popularity and expected to expand dramatically in the years to come. As UAVs gain more attention, one of the immediate requirements would be to have UAVs work as much autonomously as possible. One of the common tasks that UAVs would be engaged in is target tracking which has various potential applications in military field, law-enforcement, wildlife protection effort, and so on.This thesis focuses on development of a controller for UAVs to track ground target. In particular, this thesis focuses on quadrotor UAV, which is a multicopter that is lifted and propelled using four motors. Admittedly, several target tracking control methods have been developed in recent years. However, only a few of them have been applied on a quadrotor. Most of these tracking methods, particularly those based on Proportional Derivative (PD) control laws, which have been applied on quadrotors, are not time efficient due to practical acceleration constraint and a number of parameters that need to be tuned. The UAV control problem can be divided into 4 sub-problems: Position Control, Motor Control, Trajectory Tracking and Trajectory Generation. In this thesis, the dynamic equations of motion for quadrotors and a Proportional Derivative control law is derived to solve the problems of Position Control, Motor Control and Trajectory Tracking. A Proportional Navigation (PN) based switching strategy is proposed to address the problem of Trajectory Generation. The experiments and numerical simulations are performed using non-maneuvering and maneuvering targets. The simulation results show that the proposed PN based switching strategy not only carries out effective tracking but also results into smaller oscillations and errors when compared to the widely used PD tracking method.The switching strategy, as proposed as a solution to target tracking problem, leaves an important question with regard to when should the switching happen. It is intuitive that the time of switching will play a role in how fast the UAV converges to the target. The second problem considered in this thesis relates to the optimal time of switching that would minimize the positional error between the UAV and the target. An optimal switching strategy is proposed to obtain the optimal switching time for both non-maneuvering and maneuvering targets. Analytical solutions that generate trajectories based on PN and PD methods are used in this strategy. The numerical simulations validate the optimality, reliability, and accuracy of the proposed method for both non-maneuvering and maneuvering targets. 2013-10-23 English text University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1378194694 http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1378194694 unrestricted This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.
collection NDLTD
language English
sources NDLTD
topic Mechanical Engineering
Unmanned Air Vehicle
quadrotor UAV
multicopter
Proportional Navigation
Trajectory Generation
spellingShingle Mechanical Engineering
Unmanned Air Vehicle
quadrotor UAV
multicopter
Proportional Navigation
Trajectory Generation
Tan, Ruoyu
Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
author Tan, Ruoyu
author_facet Tan, Ruoyu
author_sort Tan, Ruoyu
title Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
title_short Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
title_full Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
title_fullStr Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
title_full_unstemmed Tracking of Ground Mobile Targets by Quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
title_sort tracking of ground mobile targets by quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles
publisher University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK
publishDate 2013
url http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1378194694
work_keys_str_mv AT tanruoyu trackingofgroundmobiletargetsbyquadrotorunmannedaerialvehicles
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