MechE PhD Thesis Defense: Dingjiang Zhou

TITLE: A CONTROL ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN INTERFACE FOR AGILE, RECONFIGURABLE MICRO AERIAL VEHICLE FORMATIONSAbstract:This thesis considers the problem of controlling a group of micro aerial vehiclesfor agile maneuvering cooperatively, or distributively. We rst introduce the background and motivation for micro aerial vehicles, especially for the popular multi-rotoraerial vehicle platform. Then, we discuss the dynamics of quadrotor helicopters. Aquadrotor is a speci c kind of multi-rotor aerial vehicle, and its dynamics has a specialproperty called di erential atness, which is not common for nonlinear systems. The property of di erential flaatness simpli es the algorithm of trajectory planning, such that instead of planning a trajectory in a 12-dimensional state space and 4-dimensional input space, we only need to plan the trajectory in 4-dimensional, socalled, at output space, while the 12-dimensional state and 4-dimensional input can be recovered from an endogenous transformation, governed by the di erential flatness property.COMMITTEE: Prof. Mac Schwager (ME) (advisor)Prof. John Baillieul (ME)Prof. Calin Belta (ME)Prof. Hua Wang (ME)

When 10:00 am to 12:00 pm on Thursday, December 1, 2016
Location 110 Cummington, Room 245