A Tube-based Robust MPC for a Fixed-wing UAV: an Application for Precision Farming
For precision agriculture, it offers a robust control solution for low-cost UAV monitoring, but the contribution is incremental as it applies existing tube-based MPC to a specific UAV platform.
This paper presents a tube-based robust MPC for fixed-wing UAVs to handle wind disturbances and model uncertainties, achieving stable waypoint tracking with low computational cost in precision farming applications.
The techniques of precision agriculture include the possibility to execute crop monitoring tasks through the application of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). These platforms are flexible, easy to use and low-cost, and they are the best candidates for improving the farm efficiency and productivity. In this research, a guidance algorithm and a robust control system are combined to guarantee the robustness of the system to additive noise (i.e. wind disturbance) and uncertainties (i.e. model parameter variations). A small fixed-wing UAV with an autonomy of about $1$ hour is proposed as case study, to reduce the cost of monitoring and increasing the stability performance of the system. A waypoint-grid on a paddy field is verified by hardware-in-the loop tests. The control scheme provides good results with a low computational effort, guaranteeing the repeatability of the monitoring and reduction of the costs.