Low-Cost Reconfigurable Control System for Small UAVs Špinka, Ondřej; Holub, Ondřej; Hanzálek, Zdenek
IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982),
2011-March, 2011-03-00, 20110301, Volume:
58, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
A case study of an open-source low-cost reconfigurable autopilot design for small unmanned aerial vehicles (the Remotely operated Aerial Model Autopilot (RAMA) control system) is presented in this ...paper. A novel distributed hierarchical architecture, implementing graceful degradation and run-time system reconfiguration techniques, is introduced. RAMA is capable of reconfiguration in case of emergency, meaning that the most critical functions, needed for vehicle controllability, can be taken over by another node of the system if the primary node fails, sacrificing some noncritical functionality. RAMA also utilizes a novel control scheme and controller implementation. Some of the results, obtained during several hundred test flights performed so far, are presented at the end.
Open Physical Models in Control Engineering Education Spinka, Ondrej; Akesson, Johan; Hanzalek, Zdenek ...
International journal of electrical engineering & education,
10/2010, Volume:
47, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper discusses the significance of physical models in engineering education. Obvious assets, drawbacks and the educational role of such models are discussed, and the idea of ‘open physical ...models’ is introduced. A couple of sophisticated open physical models (an unmanned rotorcraft and an inverted pendulum robot), used in control engineering courses, are presented. Basic ideas and concepts, use of the models in student courses and projects, as well as experiences of the authors, are also presented.
Control System for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Spinka, O.; Kroupa, S.; Hanzalek, Z.
2007 5th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics,
2007-July, Volume:
1
Conference Proceeding
An open project, dealing with autopilot design for autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is introduced in this paper. Networked hierarchical distributed control system is being proposed and its ...hardware and software structure is briefly described. Mathematical model of a small rotorcraft is presented and identification methodology and state estimation using Extended Kalman Filter are discussed. Control algorithms, based on PI, LQG and SDRE approaches, focused on rotorcraft UAVs are proposed, including a complex hierarchical autopilot design. Real data, measured during test-flights of an experimental UAV, are presented.
This paper presents two ways of how to tackle a problem of vehicle navigation and guidance, and focuses on evaluation of the performance and energy consumption of both methods. A simple energy-aware ...computing scheme, intended for control, navigation and guidance of autonomous unmanned aircraft, is proposed to try to make the most of both methods - providing good tracking accuracy whenever needed, minimizing power consumption otherwise. This scheme is based on the idea of using simple, non-demanding algorithms whenever possible and switching to sophisticated, more accurate control methods only when required by the mission profile. Simple algorithms may be executed in modules with less computing power, allowing high-performance on-board computers (needed for real-time execution of complex tasks) to be suspended, thus conserving energy. This scheme might bring noticeable benefits especially for vehicles in the micro-UAV category, where the amount of usable energy is extremely limited and the portion of energy consumed by on-board computers might be significant (up to 20%, according our measurements).
The aim of this paper is to describe the method used to analyze timing properties of a Linux-based CAN-to-CAN gateway and to briefly present some of the analysis results. The considered gateway, ...implemented as an embedded system, can significantly simplify rapid prototyping of CAN-based distributed systems such as those used in automotive applications. The main interest was to measure the latencies induced by the gateway under the wide range of conditions such as various types of traffic, gateway configurations, additional system load and Linux kernel versions. The combinations of these conditions resulted in almost 400 different experiments and more than 600 graphs visualizing the results. A simple method to automate the experiments and to effectively draw conclusions from such a high number of experiments is proposed.
The aim of this paper is to introduce LinCAN, a CAN driver system for Linux, developed at the Department of Control Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague, and to provide a thorough ...comparison with SocketCAN, which is the most common CAN solution for Linux nowadays. Thorough timing analysis and performance comparison with Socket CAN are presented, with several case-studies and applications of LinCAN shown in the end. LinCAN has been developed since 2003 and supports many CAN controllers from various manufacturers. It is designed with emphasis on strict real-time properties and reliability, making it ideally suitable for networked control systems (as is also demonstrated in the case-studies). LinCAN is also portable to other Operating Systems and can be used even system-less (without any OS) on less-powerful microcontrollers. A timing analysis and performance tests of both drivers were performed using various types of load with several recent Linux kernels. Obtained results indicate that LinCAN seems better suited for hard real-time applications, its performance being either better or on-par with SocketCAN in presented tests. Both LinCAN and SocketCAN drivers are completely open-source as well as our testing tools, so any researcher interested in our results is welcome to download all relevant source codes, check our testing methodology in detail and perhaps recreate our results or extend them by performing other test, providing valuable feedback and independent verification of our work.
