Smooth free-cycle dynamic soaring in unspecified shear wind via quadratic programming

Harvesting wind energy is promising for extending long-endurance flights, which can be greatly facilitated by a flight technique called dynamic soaring. The presented study is concerned with generating model-based trajectories with smooth control histories for dynamic soaring maneuvers exploiting wind gradients. The desired smoothness is achieved by introducing a trigonometric series parameterization for the controls, which are formulated with respect to the normalized time.Specifically, the per...     

无人机群体视角下的轨迹预测CSCD

利用无人机对观测目标的运动轨迹进行预测是当前无人系统领域的关键任务之一。目前的目标轨迹预测研究通常基于单一无人机所采集的轨迹数据,但由于场景中障碍物以及视角倾斜等因素的影响,单无人机不易稳定监测目标具体位置,容易导致目标丢失。而且,现有利用无人机的目标轨迹预测一般基于鸟瞰视角,没有发挥出无人机的灵活性。随着无人机集群协同技术的发展,无人机群体视角为目标全方位监测提供了新的思路,在解决目标丢失和目标遮挡问题中具有明显的优势。同时,基于多无人机的位姿估计可以估计出目标的准确三维坐标,为无人机的灵活视角观测提供基础。因此,从轨迹预测的相关工作出发,探讨无人机群体视角下轨迹预测中面临的挑战和解决思路,以期对未来的轨迹预测研究以及集群协同技术发展提供一定帮助。     

Optimal trajectory design accounting for the stabilization of linear time-varying error dynamics

This study is dedicated to the development of a direct optimal control-based algorithm for trajectory optimization problems that accounts for the closed-loop stability of the trajectory tracking error dynamics already during the optimization. Consequently, the trajectory is designed such that the Linear Time-Varying(LTV) dynamic system, describing the controller’s error dynamics, is stable, while additionally the desired optimality criterion is optimized and all enforced constraints on the traje...     

A novel visual servo method for space manipulators by planning jerk

A novel trajectory planning method for space manipulators is proposed in this article, which can generate trajectory in Cartesian space with continuous joint jerk. The key idea is that, given the desired position for an individual joint, the corresponding joint trajectory is generated in a way like a controller. The generated jerk acts as the controller’s output driving an ideal third-order system to arrive at the desired position, with no need for discrete points in advance. In real applications, the visual servo task is accomplished hierarchically. Since the desired pose in Cartesian space measured by cameras concerns multi degrees of freedom (DOF), desired positions for individual joints are obtained by inverse-kinematics model. Then, joint trajectories are generated as above. To improve the trajectory’s smoothness, a bridging matrix is implemented to ensure that the desired pose varies continuously. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method is effective to track targets with different kinds of motion, i.e. can track the input-bounded signal asymptotically.     

A policy iteration method for improving robot assembly trajectory efficiency

Bolt assembly by robots is a vital and difficult task for replacing astronauts in extra-vehicular activities (EVA), but the trajectory efficiency still needs to be improved during the wrench insertion into hex hole of bolt. In this paper, a policy iteration method based on reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed, by which the problem of trajectory efficiency improvement is constructed as an issue of RL-based objective optimization. Firstly, the projection relation between raw data and state-action space is established, and then a policy iteration initialization method is designed based on the projection to provide the initialization policy for iteration. Policy iteration based on the protective policy is applied to continuously evaluating and optimizing the action-value function of all state-action pairs till the convergence is obtained. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, a noncontact demonstration experiment with human supervision is performed. Experimental results show that the initialization policy and the generated policy can be obtained by the policy iteration method in a limited number of demonstrations. A comparison between the experiments with two different assembly tolerances shows that the convergent generated policy possesses higher trajectory efficiency than the conservative one. In addition, this method can ensure safety during the training process and improve utilization efficiency of demonstration data.     

Lift performance enhancement for flapping airfoils by considering surging motion

The flapping motion has a great impact on the aerodynamic performance of flapping wings. In this paper, a surging motion is added to an airfoil performing pitching-plunging combined motion to figure out how it influences the lift performance and flow pattern of flapping airfoils. Firstly, the numerical methods are validated by a NACA0012 airfoil pitching case and a NACA0012 airfoil plunging case. Then, the E377m airfoil which has typical geometric characteristics of the bird-like airfoil is selected as the calculation model to study how phase differences φ₁ between surging motion and plunging motion affect the aerodynamic performance of flapping airfoils. The results show that the airfoil with surging motion has comprehensively better lift performance and thrust performance than the airfoil without surging motion when 15°< φ₁ < 90°. It is demonstrated that surging motion has a powerful ability to improve the aerodynamic performance of flapping airfoil by adjusting φ₁. Finally, to further explore how flapping airfoil improves lift performance by considering surging motion, the flapping motions of E377m airfoil with the highest lift coefficient and lift efficiency are obtained through trajectory optimization. The surging motion is removed in the highest lift case and highest lift efficiency case respectively, and the mechanism that surging motion adjusts the aerodynamic force is analyzed in detail by comparing the vortex structure and kinematic parameters. The results of this paper help reveal the aerodynamic mechanism of bird flight and guide the design of Flapping wing Micro Air Vehicles (FMAV).