Garone Emanuele

Nicotra Marco M., Naldi Roberto, Garone Emanuele

This paper focuses on the design of a stabilizing control law for an aerial vehicle which is physically connected to a ground station by means of a tether cable. By taking advantage of the tensile force acting along the taut cable, it is shown that the tethered UAV is able to maintain a non-zero attitude while hovering in a constant position. The control objective is to stabilize the desired configuration while simultaneously ensuring that the cable remains taut at all times. This leads to a nonlinear control problem subject to constraints. This paper provides a two-step solution. First, the system is stabilized using a cascade control scheme based on thrust vectoring. Then, constraint satisfaction is guaranteed using a novel Reference Governor scheme.

Tam W. Nguyen, Laurent Catoire, Emanuele Garone

This paper focuses on the control of a cooperative system composed of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) manipulating an object. The two units are subject to input saturations and collaborate to move the object to a desired pose characterized by its position and inclination. The dynamics are derived using Euler-Lagrange method. A pre-stabilizing control law is proposed where the UGV is tasked to deploy the object to a certain position whereas the UAV adjusts its inclination. In particular, a proportional-derivative control law is proposed for the UGV, and a cascade control approach is used for the UAV, where the inner loop controls the attitude of the UAV and the outer loop stabilizes the inclination of the object. Then, we prove the stability of the points of equilibrium using small gain arguments. To ensure constraints satisfaction at all times, a reference governor unit is added to the pre-stabilizing control scheme. Finally, numerical results combined with experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme in practice.