Collision-free navigation of an autonomous unmanned helicopter in unknown urban environments: Sliding mode and mpc approaches

  • Authors:

  • Michael Hoy;Alexey s. Matveev;Matt Garratt;Andrey v. Savkin

  • Affiliations:

  • >school of electrical engineering and telecommunication, university of new south wales,sydney, australia. e-mail: a.savkin@unsw.edu.au;Department of mathematics and mechanics, saint petersburg university, st. petersburg, russia. e-mail: almat1712@yahoo.com;School of aerospace, civil and mechanical engineering, university of new south wales at the australian defense force academy, canberra, australia. e-mail: m.garratt@adfa.edu.au;>school of electrical engineering and telecommunication, university of new south wales,sydney, australia. e-mail: a.savkin@unsw.edu.au

  • Venue:
  • Robotica
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

When employing autonomous helicopters, it is desirable to use navigation approaches, which firmly ensure safety. In this paper, we propose and compare two approaches to navigation through environments containing obstacles. The first uses sliding mode boundary following to maintain a prespecified distance to obstacles, and the second uses a model predictive control approach to plan short horizon trajectories around detected objects, while ensuring that the helicopter is brought to a halt within the sensor visibility radius. The navigation approaches are subjected to analysis for robustness, and simulations are carried out with a realistic helicopter model for verification. Additional real-world experiments were performed with a wheeled robot to demonstrate potential for real-time application.