Invited Speaker 3 & 4: Flight Dynamics Modelling and Control Motion and Task Planning of Small-sized Rotorcraft

An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft that is equipped with necessary data processing units, sensors, automatic control, and communications systems. It can perform autonomous flight missions without the interference of a human pilot. It is observed that autonomous aerial vehicles play major roles in certain tasks such as reconnaissance for search and rescue, environment monitoring, and security surveillance. Their mobility and sensing capabilities make them an ideal platform for exploration and monitoring tasks. The challenge is that they need to deal with various situations such as unexpected obstacles, collision and device failures. In this workshop, we aim to report some recent research and development in unmanned aerial systems technologies. Emphases are placed on mission management, motion planning and perception technologies that are capable of autonomously guiding, navigating and controlling unmanned systems in cluttered and GPS-denied environments. We will present the development of accurate flight dynamics models, which can assist flight control law design efficiently in terms of parameter tuning and performance evaluation. Based on the identified models, the model analysis and control design technologies will be introduced. To solve the challenges in unknown environments, we will also present the motion planning technologies for small-size rotorcraft, which can formulate an optimization problem by employing several approaches. Task planning involving logical and temporal constraints will also be covered in this workshop.