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In this paper, we propose a hybrid modelling and control design scheme for an unmanned helicopter. This control structure has a hierarchical form with three layers: the regulation layer, the motion planning layer, and the supervision layer. For each layer, a separate hybrid controller has been developed. Then, a composition operator is adopted to capture the interactions between these layers. The resulting closed-loop system can flexibly command the helicopter to perform different tasks, autonomously. The designed controller is embedded in the avionic system of an unmanned helicopter, and actual flight test results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies decentralised formation control of multiple vehicles in the plane when each vehicle can only measure the local bearings of their neighbours by using bearing-only sensors. Since the inter-vehicle distance cannot be measured, the target formation involves no distance constraints. More specifically, the target formation considered in this paper is an angle-constrained cyclic formation, where each vehicle has exactly two neighbours and the angle at each vehicle subtended by its two neighbours is pre-specified. To stabilise the target formation, we propose a discontinuous control law that only requires the sign information of the angle errors. Due to the discontinuity of the proposed control law, the stability of the closed-loop system is analysed by employing a locally Lipschitz Lyapunov function and nonsmooth analysis tools. We prove that the target formation is locally finite-time stable with collision avoidance guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]