The University of Texas at Arlington Autonomous Aerial Vehicle—An overview

摘要

This paper reports on the status of The University of Texas at Arlington student effort to design, build and fly an Autonomous Aerial Vehicle. Both the 1991 entry into the First International Aerial Robotics Competition as well as refinements being made for 1992 are described. Significant technical highlights include a real-time vision system for target objective tracking, a real-time ultrasonic locator system for position sensing, a novel mechanism for gradually moving from human to computer control, and a hierarchical control structure implemented on a 32-bit microcontroller. Detailed discussion about the design of multivariable automatic controls for stability augmentation is included. Position and attitude control loops are optimized according to a combined ℋ2 and ℋ∞ criteria. We present a modification of a recently published procedure for recovering a desired open-loop transfer function shape within the framework of the mixed ℋ2/ℋ∞ problem. This work has led to a new result that frees a design parameter related to imposing the ℋ∞ constraint. The additional freedom can be used to improve upon the performance and robustness characteristics of the system.