Date of Award

Spring 2019

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Mechanical Engineering

Degree Name

Master of Science

First Advisor

May-Win Thein

Second Advisor

Se Young Yoon

Third Advisor

Michael Carter

Abstract

This thesis presents a method of automated control gain tuning for a Quadcopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and proposes a method of coordination multiple autonomous robotic agents capable for formation aggregation.

Sliding Mode Control for Quadcopter altitude and attitude stabilization is presented and tuned using Particle Swarm Optimization. Different configurations for the optimization process are compared to determine an effective and time-efficient setup to complete the control gain tuning.

The multi-agent coordination scheme expands upon an existing adjustable swarm framework based on an Artificial Potential Field Sliding Mode Controller. The original leader-follower scheme is modified with the goal of producing a leaderless swarm where agents move towards specific locations to aggregate a desired formation. Analysis of the swarm control scheme pays particular attention to maintaining proper distance between agents. Using Lyapunov methods following that of the original controller analysis, stability under first order and general higher order dynamics is analyzed.

Numerical simulations of the swarm controller using agents with nonlinear Quadcopter or second order point mass dynamics are presented to illustrate the capabilities of this algorithm. The automatically tuned Quadcopter controller is used in simulations when applicable. The development of an experimental test platform is discussed with the intention of validating the simulation results on physical Quadcopters.

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