Load Transportation Using Aerial Robots, 1st ed. 2019 Safe and Efficient Load Manipulation SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology Series

Unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly being used to perform complex functions or to assist humans to carry out dangerous missions within dynamic environments. Other possible applications include search and rescue, disaster relief operations, environmental monitoring, wireless surveillance networks, and cooperative manipulation. Creating these types of autonomous aerial vehicles places severe demands on the design of control schemes that can adapt to different scenarios and possible changes of vehicle dynamics. In this book we address the challenging problem of employing aerial robots to transport and manipulate loads safely and efficiently. Aerial load manipulation and transportation is extremely important in emergency rescue missions as well as for military and industrial purposes. This book gives an insight into problems that can arise in aerial load transportation and suggests control systems techniques to solve them. A key focus is given on modeling of the aerial load transportation system as well as stability and robustness analysis. A detailed design and derivation of control algorithms based on adaptive control, optimal control and reinforcement learning are discussed in detail. Furthermore, an experimental testbed and controller implementation are delineated.

Rafael Fierro is a Professor at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico, where he has been since 2007. He received a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas-Arlington. Prior to joining UNM, he held a postdoctoral appointment with the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University. His research interests include cooperative control, robotic networks, hybrid systems, autonomous vehicles, and multi-agent systems. He directs the Multi-Agent, Robotics, Hybrid and Embedded Systems (MARHES) Laboratory. Rafael Fierro was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, a 2004 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and the 2008 International Society of Automation (ISA) Transactions Best Paper Award. He is currently serving as Associate Editor for the new IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems T-CNS.

Patricio Cruz is a research assistant in the MARHES Lab at the University of New Mexico (UNM). He is also presently enrolled as a Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UNM. In 2005, he received the B.S. degree in Electronics and Control Engineering from Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN), Quito-Ecuador. Then, he worked as design and maintenance engineer for important companies in Ecuador. During 2007, he started teaching undergraduate courses and labs at the College of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at EPN. In 2010, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in the Fulbright Faculty Development Program. He obtained his M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from UNM in 2012. His M.Sc. thesis focused on the design and implementation of a real-time control architecture for a multi-vehicle aerial test bed. Different publications of the MARHES research group have used this architecture for experimental validation. His research interests include

Offers the reader a better understanding of the current challenges facing the development of the future generation of unmanned aerial vehicles

Provides insights into problems that arise and have to be solved when achieving safe and efficient autonomous aerial load transportation

Presents detailed methods for experimental implementation of the proposed algorithms