Unmanned Vehcle Navigation and Control: A Fuzzy Logic Perspective

Abstract

A general fuzzy logic based framework along with its application specific modifications is discussed to support, evaluate and justify the proposed perspective to unmanned vehicle autonomous navigation and control. Experimental and simulation results are included to validate and support implemented techniques and approaches to ground, aerial and underwater vehicles. A comparative study of classical and soft computing based controllers, designed to control small unmanned helicopters under hovering and cruising offers additional information related to the claim that fuzzy logic controllers may be implemented successfully when such helicopters perform non-aggressive flight patterns. The paper contribution is straight forward: it provides evidence of the usefulness and applicability of fuzzy logic as a viable alternative to using analytic approaches, and as a modeling tool that deals with imprecision and uncertainty