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This paper explores the development of a Quadcopter-Rover System specifically designed for environmental survey applications. The system combines the capabilities of a quadcopter and a rover to provide a comprehensive and versatile solution for data collection and analysis. The paper presents a detailed overview of the system's modelling, design, and manufacturing of the two main components: the quadcopter and the differential wheel robot (the rover). The quadcopter’s main task is to carry the rover to/from the ground destination and collect aerial data while the rover`s main task is ground exploration and data collection. The paper discusses the development of a robust and efficient control algorithm that enables autonomous and coordinated operation between the quadcopter and the rover. Experimental results demonstrate the system's effectiveness in conducting environmental surveys, showcasing its ability to accurately navigate challenging terrains, and collect valuable data for environmental analysis. The Quadcopter-Rover System offers significant potential in applications such as ecological monitoring, disaster management, and precision agriculture, where comprehensive and efficient data collection is crucial for informed decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a general real-time, numerically stable optimization framework for time polynomial-based trajectory generation of autonomous aerial robots. The proposed general optimization framework (GOF) allows various optimization criteria for trajectory generation cost-function, such as minimizing the trajectory total length, time, and position derivatives. Minimizing position derivatives includes velocity, acceleration, jerk, and snap, or any combination of them. This study considers the quadrotor as the test platform. By exploiting tools from the calculus of variations, differential flatness property, and polynomial-based trajectories, the developed algorithm finds feasible trajectories without extensive computational sampling and iterative searching in the high-dimensional state space of quadrotor dynamics. The GOF includes a segment-wise gradient descent-like algorithm to iteratively decrease the allowed time of each segment individually so as to avoid getting stuck at a local minimum. The comparison analysis with existing methods validated the numerical stability and computational speed advantages of the proposed approach. It also shows that the algorithm is suitable for the real-time generation of high-performance long-range trajectories consisting of a large number of waypoints and high-order piecewise polynomials. An animated simulation of this work is available at https://youtu.be/E1AC1vyPqOE [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the aim of efficiently achieving complex trajectory tracking missions in the presence of model uncertainties and exogenous disturbances, this paper proposes a robust hybrid control for the orientation and position of flying robots by adopting insights from sliding mode, geometric tracking, and nonlinear feedback control strategies. Various retrofits are implemented to the composite control scheme in order to tackle the system uncertainties, eliminate the chattering effects, and enhance the trajectory tracking performance. The convergence and stability analysis demonstrated the asymptotic stability of the proposed control algorithm. To reveal the promising performance of the developed control schemes, a qualitative comparative analysis of different proposed control approaches is performed. The comparative analysis examines highly maneuverable trajectories for various tracking scenarios in the presence of uncertain disturbances. The simulation results demonstrated the versatility, robustness, and convergence of the developed control laws that allow autonomous flying robots to effectively perform agile maneuvers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an approach to predict the nonlinear aerodynamics of a structurally damaged aircraft model based on the engineering level aerodynamic prediction methods, DATCOM. Raw results from the code provide good correlation with wind tunnel data at very low angles of attack, but accuracy deteriorates rapidly as the angle of attack increases. A new methodology is then proposed which combines the experimental results of healthy aircraft with the predicted aerodynamics of the damaged cases, to yield better correlation between experimental and predicted aerodynamic coefficients for damaged aircraft. Three damage-configurations are studied at supersonic speeds. The methodology can be used to quickly generate aerodynamic model for damaged aircraft for simulation and reconfigurable control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]