• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.298-304
• /
• 2016

In this paper, a wavelet packet transform method is proposed for improving the altitude control performance of quadrotor UAV using an ultrasonic rangefinder. A ground tests are conducted using an ultrasonic rangefinder that is much used for vertical takeoff and landing. An ultrasonic rangefinder suffers from signal's spike due to specular reflectance and acoustic noise. The occurred spikes in short time span need to be analyzed at both sides time and frequency domain. The analyzed spikes of the ultrasonic rangefinder using a wavelet packet transform. Compared with the discrete wavelet transform, the wavelet packet decomposition can obtain more abundant time-frequency localization information, so it is more suitable for analyzing and processing ultrasonic signals spike. Experimental results show that it can effectively remove the spikes of the ultrasonic rangefinder.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.41 no.10
• /
• pp.1247-1255
• /
• 2016

The safety and autonomous flight function of micro UAV or drones is crucial to its commercial application. The requirement of own building stable drones is still a non-trivial obstacle for researchers that want to focus on the intelligence function, such vision and navigation algorithm. The paper present a GCS using commercial drone and hardware platforms, and open source software. The system follows modular architecture and now composed of the communication, UI, image processing. Especially, lane-keeping algorithm. are designed and verified through testing at a sports stadium. The designed lane-keeping algorithm estimates drone position and heading in the lane using Hough transform for line detection, RANSAC-vanishing point algorithm for selecting the desired lines, and tracking algorithm for stability of lines. The flight of drone is controlled by 'forward', 'stop', 'clock-rotate', and 'counter-clock rotate' commands. The present implemented system can fly straight and mild curve lane at 2-3 m/s.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.17 no.1
• /
• pp.76-85
• /
• 2022

One of the most fundamental challenges when designing controllers for dynamic systems is the adjustment of controller parameters. Usually the system model is used to get the initial controller, but eventually the controller parameters must be manually adjusted in the real system to achieve the best performance. To avoid this manual tuning step, data-driven methods such as machine learning were used. Recently, reinforcement learning became one alternative of this problem to be considered as an agent learns policies in large state space with trial-and-error Markov Decision Process (MDP) which is widely used in the field of robotics. However, on initial training step, as an agent tries to explore to the new state space with random action and acts directly on the controller parameters in real systems, MDP can lead the system safety-critical system failures. Therefore, the issue of 'safe exploration' became important. In this paper we meet 'safe exploration' condition with Control Barrier Function (CBF) which converts direct constraints on the state space to the implicit constraint of the control inputs. Given an initial low-performance controller, it automatically optimizes the parameters of the control law while ensuring safety by the CBF so that the agent can learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Simulation results on a quadrotor UAV indicate that the proposed method can safely optimize controller parameters quickly and automatically.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.42 no.10
• /
• pp.842-850
• /
• 2014

This paper presents a trajectory tracking controller for rotorcraft UAVs to improve the tracking performances in the presence of various uncertainties. The proposed tracking method consists of a velocity guidance law based on the relative distance and L1 adaptive augmentation loop for tracking the velocity commands. In the proposed structure, the desired velocity generated by the guidance law is the reference value of the adaptive controller for accurate path tracking. In the guidance law, the desired acceleration is generated based on the relative distance and its derivatives, and then the velocity command of the inner control loop is calculated by integrating the accelerations. $L_1$ augmentation loop supplements the linear controller to guarantee the flight performances such as a tracking accuracy in the presence of the uncertainties. The proposed controller was validated in actual flight tests to successfully demonstrate its capability using a quadrotor UAV.