Ewoud Jan Jacob Smeur

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Verified

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Assistant) at Delft University of Technology

The inertia tensor is an important parameter in many engineering fields, but measuring it can be cumbersome and involve multiple experiments or accurate and expensive equipment. We propose a method to measure the moment of inertia tensor of a rigid body from a single spinning throw, by attaching a small and inexpensive stand-alone measurement devic...

Tailsitter aircraft attract considerable interest due to their capabilities of both agile hover and high speed forward flight. However, traditional tailsitters that use aerodynamic control surfaces face the challenge of limited control effectiveness and associated actuator saturation during vertical flight and transitions. Conversely, tailsitters r...

Tailsitter aircraft attract considerable interest due to their capabilities of both agile hover and high speed forward flight. However, traditional tailsitters that use aerodynamic control surfaces face the challenge of limited control effectiveness and associated actuator saturation during vertical flight and transitions. Conversely, tailsitters r...

Though control algorithms for multirotor Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) are well understood, the configuration, parameter estimation, and tuning of flight control algorithms takes quite some time and resources. In previous work, we have shown that it is possible to identify the control effectiveness and motor dynamics of a multirotor fast enough for it...

This paper presents a method to recover quadrotor UAV from a throw, when no control parameters are known before the throw. We leverage the availability of high-frequency rotor speed feedback available in racing drone hardware and software to find control effectiveness values and fit a motor model using recursive least squares (RLS) estimation. Furt...

Aerial physical interaction opens the door for many operations at height to be automated using flying robots. This research presents a novel manipulator design mounted on a traditional quadrotor, which employs both mechanical and software compliance to perform physical interaction on vertical walls and overhanging surfaces, such as those found unde...

Hybrid overactuated Tilt Rotor are a category of versatile UAVs known for their exceptional wind resistance capabilities. However, their extensive operational range, combined with thrust vectoring capabilities, presents complex control challenges due to non-affine dynamics and the necessity to coordinate lift and thrust for controlling acceleration...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to perform many different missions, some of which may require a large aircraft for endurance and a small aircraft for maneuverability in wind gusts or cluttered environments such as buildings. This paper proposes a novel combination of a quadrotor and a hybrid biplane capable of joint hover, joint...

Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Vehicles UAV are vehicles capable of take-off and landing vertically like helicopters while maintaining the long-range efficiency of fixed-wing aircraft. Unfortunately, due to their wing area, these vehicles are sensitive to wind gusts when hovering. One way to increase the hovering wind-rejection capabilities of hybrid UAV i...

In vehicle control, control allocation is often used to abstract control variables from actuators, simplifying controller design and enhancing performance. Surveying available literature reveals that explicit solutions are restricted to strong assumptions on the actuators, or otherwise fail to exploit the capabilities of the actuator constellation....

This paper puts forward a novel design for an airspeed instrument aimed at small fixed-wing tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles. The working principle is to relate the power spectra of the wall-pressure fluctuations beneath the turbulent boundary layer present over the vehicle’s body in flight to its airspeed. The instrument consists of two microp...

In this paper, we derive a sensor-based nonlinear dynamic inversion (NDI) control law for a nonlinear system with first-order linear actuators, and compare it to incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI), which has gained popularity in recent years. It is shown that, for first-order actuator dynamics, INDI approximates the corresponding NDI co...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to perform many different missions, some of which may require a large aircraft for endurance and a small aircraft for maneuverability in a building. This paper proposes a novel combination of a quadrotor and a hybrid bi-plane capable of joint hover, joint forward flight, and mid-air disassembly fol...

Tailsitters have complex aerodynamics that make them hard to control throughout the entire flight envelope, especially at very high angle of attack (AoA) and reverse flow conditions. The development of controllers for these vehicles is hampered by the absence of publicly available data on forces and moments experienced in such conditions. In this p...

In this paper, we derive a Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (NDI) control law for a non-linear system with first order linear actuators, and compare it to Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI), which has gained popularity in recent years. It is shown that for first order actuator dynamics, INDI approximates the corresponding NDI control law arb...

Rotorcraft, fixed wing and hybrid Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) each have applications in which they excel. Traditionally, dedicated autopilot control code is written to accommodate flight of each UAV type. This causes fragmentation of control code and may lead to performance differences or errors. In this paper, we propose to use the same INDI contr...

Many Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) applications require vertical take-off and landing and very long-range capabilities. Fixed-wing aircraft need long runways to land, and electric energy is still a bottleneck for helicopters, which are not range efficient. In this paper, we introduce the NederDrone, a hybrid lift, hybrid energy hydrogen-powered UAV th...

A lot of UAV applications require vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) combined with very long-range or endurance. Transitioning UAVs have been proposed to combine the VTOL capabilities of helicopters with the efficient long-range flight properties of fixed-wing aircraft. But energy is still a bottleneck for many electric long endurance application...

We propose a combined method for the collaborative transportation of a suspended payload by a team of rotorcraft. A recent distance-based formation-motion control algorithm based on assigning distance disagreements among robots generates the acceleration signals to be tracked by the vehicles. In particular, the proposed method does not need global...

We propose a combined method for the collaborative transportation of a suspended payload by a team of rotorcraft. A recent distance-based formation-motion control algorithm based on assigning distance disagreements among robots generates the acceleration signals to be tracked by the vehicles. In particular, the proposed method does not need global...

This paper presents the cascaded integration of Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) for attitude control and INDI for position control of micro air vehicles. Significant improvements over a traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller are demonstrated in an experiment where the quadrotor flies in and out of a 10 m/s wind...

To participate in the Outback Medical Express UAV Challenge 2016, a vehicle was designed and tested that can autonomously hover precisely, takeoff and land vertically, fly fast forward efficiently, and use computer vision to locate a person and a suitable landing location. The vehicle is a novel hybrid tail‐sitter combining a delta‐shaped biplane f...

Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combine hovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult to control, because their aerodynamics are hard to model and they are susceptible to wind gusts. This often leads to composite...

Hybrid unmanned aircraft can significantly increase the potential of micro air vehicles, because they combine hovering capability with a wing for fast and efficient forward flight. However, these vehicles are very difficult to control, because their aerodynamics are hard to model and they are susceptible to wind gusts. This often leads to composite...

This paper deals with the problem of actuator saturation for INDI (Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion) controlled flying vehicles. The primary problem that arises from actuator saturation for quadrotors, is that of arbitrary control objective realization. We have integrated the weighted least squares control allocation algorithm into INDI, whi...

Maintaining stable flight during high turbulence intensities is challenging for fixed-wing micro air vehicles (MAV). Two methods are proposed to improve the disturbance rejection performance of the MAV: incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) control and phase-advanced pitch probes. INDI uses the angular acceleration measurements to countera...

This study presents the development of the transitioning vehicle Cyclone, which has been specifically designed for meteorological and agricultural applications. The mission requirements demand takeoff and landing from a small area and the ability to cope with high wind speeds. In contrast with recent suggestions, our proposed design aims to be clos...

This work investigates the design parameters and their consequences in the control of a helicopter rotor combined with a pair of fixed wings. This hybrid vehicle has a light and aerodynamically efficient rotor with a large range of pitch angles to enable both hover and forward flight. Because of the light stiff rotor and heavy wings, the hybrid veh...

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are limited in their operation outdoors near obstacles by their ability to withstand wind gusts. Currently widespread position control methods such as Proportional Integral Derivative control do not perform well under the influence of gusts. Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control techni...

To participate in the Outback Medical Express UAV Challenge 2016, a vehicle was designed and tested that can hover precisely, take-off and land vertically, fly fast forward efficiently and use computer vision to locate a person and a suitable landing location. A rotor blade was designed that can deliver sufficient thrust in hover, while still being...

This work investigates the design parameters and consequences in the control of a helicopter rotor combined with a pair of fixed wings. This hybrid vehicle has a light and aerodynamically efficient rotor that can achieve large pitch angles to allow forward flight. Because of the light stiff rotor and heavy wings, the hybrid vehicle exhibits couplin...

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are limited in their operation outdoors near obstacles by their ability to withstand wind gusts. Currently widespread position control methods such as Proportional Integral Derivative control do not perform well under the influence of gusts. Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) is a sensor-based control techni...

Incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion is a sensor-based control approach that promises to provide high-performance nonlinear control without requiring a detailed model of the controlled vehicle. In the context of attitude control of micro air vehicles, incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion only uses a control effectiveness model and uses estima...

Recent advances in sensor miniaturization have enabled the development of a miniaturized fully functional autopilot. In this article, the open hardware and open software Paparazzi-UAV Lisa-S micro autopilot is presented, weighing only 2.8 grams and measuring 2 by 2 centime-ters. It incorporates 2-way telemetry with a ground station, a Spektrum DMS2...

The concept of an aircraft capable of both hover as well as fast forward flight (hybrid) has re-cently been implemented on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Hybrid UAVs combine hover capability with long range and endurance. As UAVs are often required to operate without hu-man intervention, there is a call for autonomous guidance of hybrid UAVs. Beca...