Modeling, Control and Coordination of Helicopter Systems provides a comprehensive treatment of helicopter systems, ranging from related nonlinear flight dynamic modeling and stability analysis to advanced control design for single helicopter systems, and also covers issues related to the coordination and formation control of multiple helicopter systems to achieve high performance tasks. Ensuring stability in helicopter flight is a challenging problem for nonlinear control design and development. This book is a valuable reference on modeling, control and coordination of helicopter systems,providing readers with practical solutions for the problems that still plague helicopter system design and implementation. Readers will gain a complete picture of helicopters at the systems level, as well as a better understanding of the technical intricacies involved.

Aerial robots, meaning robots with flying capabilities, are essentially robotic platforms, which are autonomously controlled via some sophisticated control engineering tools. Similar to aerial vehichles, they can overcome the gravitational forces thanks to their design and/or actuation type. What makes them different from the conventional aerial vehicles, is the level of their autonomy. Reducing the complexity for piloting of such robots/vehicles provide the human operator more freedom and comfort. With their increasing autonomy, they can perform many complicated tasks by their own (such as surveillance, monitoring, or inspection), leaving the human operator the most high-level decisions to be made, if necessary. In this way they can be operated in hazardous and challenging environments, which might posses high risks to the human health. Thanks to their wide range of usage, the ongoing researches on aerial robots is expected to have an increasing impact on the human life. Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) is a case, in which the aerial robot exerts meaningful forces and torques (wrench) to its environment while preserving its stable flight. In this case, the robot does not try avoiding every obstacle in its environment, but prepare itself for embracing the effect of a physical interaction, furthermore turn this interaction into some meaningful robotic tasks. Aerial manipulation can be considered as a subset of APhI, where the flying robot is designed and controlled in purpose of manipulating its environment. A clear motivation of using aerial robots for physical interaction, is to benefit their great workspace and agility. Moreover, developing robots that can perform not only APhI but also aerial manipulation can bring the great workspace of the flying robots together with the vast dexterity of the manipulating arms. This thesis work is addressing the design, modeling and control problem of these aerial robots for the purpose of physical interaction and manipulation. Using the nonlinear mathematical models of the robots at hand, in this thesis several different control methods (IDA-PBC, Exact Linearization, Differential Flatness Based Control) for APhI and aerial manipulation tasks have been developed and proposed. Furthermore, novel design tools (e.g. new rigid/elastic manipulating arms, hardware, software) to be used together with miniature aerial robots are presented within this thesis, which contributes to the robotics society not only in terms of concrete theory but also practical implementation and experimental robotics.

UNMANNED AIRCRAF T SYSTEMS UNMANNED AIRCRAF T SYSTEMS An unmanned aircraft system (UAS), sometimes called a drone, is an aircraft without a human pilot on board ??? instead, the UAS can be controlled by an operator station on the ground or may be autonomous in operation. UAS are capable of addressing a broad range of applications in diverse, complex environments. Traditionally employed in mainly military applications, recent regulatory changes around the world are leading to an explosion of interest and wide-ranging new applications for UAS in civil airspace. Covering the design, development, operation, and mission profiles of unmanned aircraft systems, this single, comprehensive volume forms a complete, stand-alone reference on the topic. The volume integrates with the online Wiley Encyclopedia of Aerospace Engineering, providing many new and updated articles for existing subscribers to that work. The chapters cover the following items: Airframe configurations and design (launch systems, power generation, propulsion) Operations (missions, integration issues, and airspace access) Coordination (multivehicle cooperation and human oversight) With contributions from leading experts, this volume is intended to be a valuable addition, and a useful resource, for aerospace manufacturers and suppliers, governmental and industrial aerospace research establishments, airline and aviation industries, university engineering and science departments, and industry analysts, consultants, and researchers.

Mobile robotics is a challenging field with great potential. It covers disciplines including electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, cognitive science, and social science. It is essential to the design of automated robots, in combination with artificial intelligence, vision, and sensor technologies. Mobile robots are widely used for surveillance, guidance, transportation and entertainment tasks, as well as medical applications. This Special Issue intends to concentrate on recent developments concerning mobile robots and the research surrounding them to enhance studies on the fundamental problems observed in the robots. Various multidisciplinary approaches and integrative contributions including navigation, learning and adaptation, networked system, biologically inspired robots and cognitive methods are welcome contributions to this Special Issue, both from a research and an application perspective.

Proceedings of the 48th Session of the International Seminars on Nuclear War and Planetary Emergencies held in Erice, Sicily. This Seminar has again gathered, in 2015, over one hundred scientists from 43 countries in an interdisciplinary effort that has been going on for the last 32 years, to examine and analyze planetary problems which had been followed up, all year long, by the World Federation of Scientists' Permanent Monitoring Panels.

There has been significant interest for designing flight controllers for small-scale unmanned helicopters. Such helicopters preserve all the physical attributes of their full-scale counterparts, being at the same time more agile and dexterous. This book presents a comprehensive and well justified analysis for designing flight controllers for small-scale unmanned helicopters guarantying flight stability and tracking accuracy. The design of the flight controller is a critical and integral part for developing an autonomous helicopter platform. Helicopters are underactuated, highly nonlinear systems with significant dynamic coupling that needs to be considered and accounted for during controller design and implementation. Most reliable mathematical tools for analysis of control systems relate to modern control theory. Modern control techniques are model-based since the controller architecture depends on the dynamic representation of the system to be controlled. Therefore, the flight controller design problem is tightly connected with the helicopter modeling. This book provides a step-by-step methodology for designing, evaluating and implementing efficient flight controllers for small-scale helicopters. Design issues that are analytically covered include: • An illustrative presentation of both linear and nonlinear models of ordinary differential equations representing the helicopter dynamics. A detailed presentation of the helicopter equations of motion is given for the derivation of both model types. In addition, an insightful presentation of the main rotor's mechanism, aerodynamics and dynamics is also provided. Both model types are of low complexity, physically meaningful and capable of encapsulating the dynamic behavior of a large class of small-scale helicopters. • An illustrative and rigorous derivation of mathematical control algorithms based on both the linear and nonlinear representation of the helicopter dynamics. Flight controller designs guarantee that the tracking objectives of the helicopter's inertial position (or velocity) and heading are achieved. Each controller is carefully constructed by considering the small-scale helicopter's physical flight capabilities. Concepts of advanced stability analysis are used to improve the efficiency and reduce the complexity of the flight control system. Controller designs are derived in both continuous time and discrete time covering discretization issues, which emerge from the implementation of the control algorithm using microprocessors. • Presentation of the most powerful, practical and efficient methods for extracting the helicopter model parameters based on input/output responses, collected by the measurement instruments. This topic is of particular importance for real-life implementation of the control algorithms. This book is suitable for students and researches interested in the development and the mathematical derivation of flight controllers for small-scale helicopters. Background knowledge in modern control is required.

Unmanned Rotorcraft Systems explores the research and development of fully-functional miniature UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) rotorcraft, and provides a complete treatment of the design of autonomous miniature rotorcraft UAVs. The unmanned system is an integration of advanced technologies developed in communications, computing, and control areas, and is an excellent testing ground for trialing and implementing modern control techniques. Included are detailed expositions of systematic hardware construction, software systems integration, aerodynamic modeling; and automatic flight control system design. Emphasis is placed on the cooperative control and flight formation of multiple UAVs, vision-based ground target tracking, and landing on moving platforms. Other issues such as the development of GPS-less indoor micro aerial vehicles and vision-based navigation are also discussed in depth: utilizing the vision-based system for accomplishing ground target tracking, attacking and landing, cooperative control and flight formation of multiple unmanned rotorcraft; and future research directions on the related areas.