Colloquium "Development and Testing of Small Aerial Vehicles with Redundant Number of Rotors"

Abstract:

Multiple rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming ubiquitous due to simplicity of their construction, implementation and maintenance. Such UAVs are able to hover, take off and land vertically. In addition, it is relatively straightforward to design an on-board autopilot. In comparison with classical helicopters, multi-rotor aircrafts provide less dangerous testbed in urban and cluttered environments due to their small size and light-weight blades. In the talk, two multi-rotor aircraft prototypes with payload up to one kilogram were presented. In order to achieve greater payload capabilities and increase robustness due to motor failures, the presented prototypes have redundant number of rotors, one has six and other eight rotors. Furthermore, we propose algorithms for data fusion from gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers and GPS for orientation and position estimation. Finally, control algorithms are designed in a multi-loop fashion and successfully tested on the prototypes. The developed UAVs are experimentally tested in real world outdoor environment conditions.

CV:

Igor Cvišić received diploma degree in Electrical Engineering from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER Zagreb), University of Zagreb, Croatia in 2001. He is currently employed at the FER, Department of Control and Computer Engineering, as a researcher on the EU FP7 ACROSS project, and he is pursuing his PhD degree. Previously, he worked at DAMCO as an R&D Engineer, where he successfully coordinated and developed more than 10 different custom made industrial automated systems based on manipulation guided by computer vision. His research interests include robotics vision, system control and automation, electronics and autonomous flying vehicles. He developed hardware and software for a multi-rotor flying machine which he presented to the Croatian military forces. For his work, he was recently awarded with the Best Paper Student Award at the RAAD Workshop, Portorož.