Claude Samson

Daniele Pucci, Tarek Hamel, Pascal Morin et al.

This paper participates in the development of a unified approach to the control of aerial vehicles with extended flight envelopes. More precisely, modeling for control purposes of a class of thrust-propelled aerial vehicles subjected to lift and drag aerodynamic forces is addressed assuming a rotational symmetry of the vehicle's shape about the thrust force axis. A condition upon aerodynamic characteristics that allows one to recast the control problem into the simpler case of a spherical vehicle is pointed out. Beside showing how to adapt nonlinear controllers developed for this latter case, the paper extends a previous work by the authors in two directions. First, the 3D case is addressed whereas only motions in a single vertical plane was considered. Secondly, the family of models of aerodynamic forces for which the aforementioned transformation holds is enlarged.

Tarek Bouazza, Tarek Hamel, Claude Samson

This paper presents a simple algebraic method to estimate the pose of a camera relative to a planar target from $n \geq 4$ reference points with known coordinates in the target frame and their corresponding bearing measurements in the camera frame. The proposed approach follows a hierarchical structure; first, the unit vector normal to the target plane is determined, followed by the camera's position vector, its distance to the target plane, and finally, the full orientation. To improve the method's robustness to measurement noise, an averaging methodology is introduced to refine the estimation of the target's normal direction. The accuracy and robustness of the approach are validated through extensive experiments.

Tarek Hamel, Claude Samson

This paper revisits the problems of estimating the position of an object moving in $n$ ($\geq 2$)-dimensional Euclidean space using velocity measurements and either direction or range measurements of one or multiple source points. The proposed solutions exploit the Continuous Riccati Equation (CRE) to calculate observer gains yielding global exponential stability of zero estimation errors, even in the case where the measured velocity is biased by an unknown constant perturbation. These results are obtained under persistent excitation (p.e.) conditions depending on the number of source points and body motion that ensure both uniform observability and good conditioning of the CRE solutions. With respect to prior contributions on these subjects some of the proposed solutions are entirely novel while others are adapted from existing ones with the preoccupation of stating simpler and more explicit conditions under which uniform exponential stability is achieved. A complementary contribution, related to the delicate tuning of the observers gains, is the derivation of a lower-bound of the exponential rate of convergence specified as a function of the amount of persistent excitation. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed observers.

Florent Le Bras, Tarek Hamel, Robert Mahony et al.

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the position of an object moving in $R^n$ from direction and velocity measurements. After addressing observability issues associated with this problem, a nonlinear observer is designed so as to encompass the case where the measured velocity is corrupted by a constant bias. Global exponential convergence of the estimation error is proved under a condition of persistent excitation upon the direction measurements. Simulation results illustrate the performance of the observer.