0000000000769155
AUTHOR
Gloria Vanegas
Elementary Clothoid-Based Three-Dimensional Curve for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
UNMANNED aerial vehicles (UAVs), either multirotor or fixed-wing UAVs, can be used in many fields to solve complex problems in safety [1], communications [2, 3], military applications [4, 5], civilian applications [6, 7], protection of nuclear plants [8], energy efficiency [9], nonlinear control [10, 11], and path planning [12], among others. Vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) is by far the most used UAV's configuration [13]. Probably the main reason is that, nowadays, there are lots of low-cost multirotor models. VTOL strategies can be applied to fixed-wing airplanes [14]; however, in normal operation they usually fly horizontally to keep a constant altitude [15, 16], but they need to per…
Smooth Three-Dimensional Route Planning for Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles With Double Continuous Curvature
This paper presents a smooth flight path planner for maneuvering in a 3D Euclidean space, which is based on two new space curves. The first one is called 'Elementary Clothoid-based 3D Curve (ECb3D)', which is built by concatenating two symmetric Clothoid-based 3D Curves (Cb3D). The combination of these curves allows to reach an arbitrary orientation in 3D Euclidean space. This new curve allows to generate continuous curvature and torsion profiles that start and finish with a null value, which means that they can be concatenated with other curves, such as straight segments, without generating discontinuities on those variables. The second curve is called 'Double Continuous Curvature 3D Curve…
Clothoid-Based Three-Dimensional Curve for Attitude Planning
Interest in flying robots, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), has grown during last years in both military and civil fields [1, 2]. The same happens to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) [3]. These vehicles, UAVs and AUVs, offer a wide variety of possible applications and challenges, such as control, guidance or navigation [2, 3]. In this sense, heading and attitude control in UAVs is very important [4], particularly relevant in airplanes (fixed-wing flying vehicles), because they are strongly non-linear, coupled, and tend to be underactuated systems with non-holonomic constraints. Hence, designing a good attitude controller is a difficult task [5, 6, 7, 8, 9], where stabilit…