Unified Control Approach Design for Aerial Vehicles
Date and time: 27 February 2025, 13:00-14:00
Speaker: Tarek Hamel, University Côte d’Azur, France
Title: Unified Control Approach Design for Aerial Vehicles
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Host: Jonas Mårtensson
Abstract: Airplanes, helicopters, and other Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles, blimps, rockets, hydroplanes, marine ships, and submarines are generally under-actuated. They are essentially composed of a rigid body immersed in a fluid medium (air or water). They are commonly controlled via a propulsive thrust force directed along a body-fixed privileged axis and a torque vector with one (in the case of a marine ship) and either two or three (in the case of airships and submarines) independent components in charge of modifying the body’s orientation on a 2D-plane or in 3D-space. These vehicles are under-actuated because, apart from the direction associated with the thrust force, the other direction(s) of displacement is (are) not directly actuated. Yet, until some recent works, the structural similarity between all these vehicles has never been exploited to develop a general control framework.
In this talk, I will give some insights to take a good step in this direction by proposing a unified control strategy that considers aerodynamic (resp. hydrodynamic) forces in the control design of a large class of aerial (resp. underwater) vehicles, including VTOL vehicles, rockets, airplanes, and convertible vehicles.
Bio: Tarek Hamel has been a Professor at the University Côte d’Azur since 2003. He received his PhD in Robotics from the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC), France 1996. After two years as a research assistant at UTC, he joined the Centre d’Études de Mécanique d’Île-de-France in 1997 as an Associate Professor. His research interests encompass nonlinear control theory, estimation, and vision-based control, with a particular focus on applications to unmanned robotic systems.
Prof. HAMEL is an IEEE Fellow and a senior Institut Universitaire de France member. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and Control Engineering Practice.