Mário Sarcinelli-Filho

Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo | UFES · Departamento de Engenharia Elétrica

This chapter explores two basic techniques to design a controller to guide differential drive wheeled robots and quadrotors, namely the single-loop dynamic control system and the inner-outer loops control system, ans shows that they can be adopted to accomplish positioning tasks, trajectory-tracking tasks and path-following tasks, with quite small...

This chapter addresses the dynamic models correspondent to various mobile vehicles. The kinematic models so far addressed do not consider the effects of the mass and inertia of the vehicles on how their velocities vary till reaching the commanded values. In other words, in the real world a velocity reference sent to a robot demands a certain time t...

This chapter discusses the kinematic models of some wheeled mobile platforms and the aerial four motors helicopter-type vehicles. Such models show that commanding suitable velocities to the robots analyzed, the wheeled omnidirectional, unicycle and car-like robots and the aerial multirotor robot as well, causes velocities in the world frame, meanin...

Two approaches to control a multi robot system, also known as a robot formation or robot cluster, namely the leader-follower and the virtual structure approaches, are dealt with in this chapter. They are discussed in details, and examples showing their implementation to control a group of two or more robots are also discussed, considering groups of...

This paper presents a practical validation of a heterogeneous formation of mobile robots in performing a load lifting, transportation, and delivery task. Assuming that an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) is unable to perform a mission by itself due to the presence of an obstacle in the navigation route, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is then assigne...

In real-world applications involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) the presence of communication delays can deteriorate the performance of flight control system or even cause instabilities. However, it is possible to improve the performance and ensure flight stability in the task execution by properly controlling the UAV considering the transport...

Path planning is a crucial part of autonomous navigation when regarding autonomous aerial vehicles, often demanding different priorities such as the length, safety or energy consumption. Dynamic programming and geometric methods have been applied to solve this problem, but in recent years, more work has been developed using artificial intelligence...

This work presents a solution for the teleoperation of a heterogeneous team of mobile robots. Regarding the team of robots, two possibilities are considered which are UAV-UGV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Unmanned Ground Vehicle) and UAV-UAV. To execute this task, high-level gesture patterns are made in a remote station, and we proposed an easy-to-train...

This work deals with a unicycle-like mobile platform pushing one and two trailers connected to it, mimicking an application in precision agriculture. The idea is to have a tractor vehicle pushing or pulling passive trailers with materials to be moved accordingly. The first part corresponds to the development of a suitable model for the whole undera...

This work discusses the accomplishment of a path-following task by a formation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The idea behind such an application is that the UAV is returning after delivering a package, and should land on the UGV, its reference base, which continues following its route towards another deli...

The problem of carrying a bar-shaped payload suspended by flexible cables attached to two quadrotors is analyzed in this work. The aerial vehicles and the load are dealt with as a single system, whose kinematics is described as a multi-robot formation using the virtual structure approach. The dynamic effects caused by the tethered load over the qua...

This paper deals with a non-contact method to identify the aerodynamic propeller constants of the Parrot AR.Drone quadrotor. The experimental setup consists of a microphone installed in the flight arena to record audio data. In terms of methodology, a spectrogram analysis is adopted to estimate the propeller velocity based on the filtered sound sig...

This work presents a strategy to autonomously guide two commercial quadrotors when navigating as a leader-follower formation in outdoor environments. The objective is to design controllers taking into account assumptions and simplifications in the UAV model. This way, the main contribution of this paper is to enhance how the point of view of real e...

A solution to the problem of path-following by a team of terrestrial mobile robots is proposed in this paper. The proposal, in this case, is a formation controller dealing with three robots navigating in a coordinate way (as a formation). Based on the controller proposed to guide the formation to follow a prescribed path, an extension to the case o...

Load transportation by unmanned aerial vehicles has many advantages in comparison with load transportation by unmanned ground vehicles. With the vehicle in the air obstacles in the ground and hard terrains are not a problem anymore, for instance. Moreover, higher speeds can be developed, allowing faster task accomplishment. The disadvantage is the...

Este artigo trata de um modelo dinâmico simplificado para o quadrimotor Parrot Bebop 2, cujos parâmetros são identificados através de um procedimento de mínimos quadrados. Além disso, esse modelo é usado para projetar controladores de alto nível para guiar autonomamente um único veículo ou uma formação de dois deles, em tarefas de seguimento de tra...

Este trabalho discute uma tarefa de rastreamento de trajetória realizada por um grupo de três quadrimotores Bebop 2 trabalhando cooperativamente para transportar uma carga. Esses veículos aéreos não tripulados (VANTs) são considerados uma formação triangular e a carga, uma estrutura em forma de triângulo, é conectada a eles através de cabos flexíve...

Neste artigo é discutido o controle de uma formação composta por um veículo terrestre não tripulado (VTNT) e um veículo aéereo não tripulado (VANT) utilizando conceitos de Espaço Nulo. A formação navega de maneira coordenada, com o VANT seguindo o VTNT, mantendo uma pose relativa em relação a ele, enquanto o VTNT segue um caminho especificado, para...

Neste trabalho se propõe uma solução para a navegação externa de quadrimotores em formação. Os veículos aéreos não tripulados (VANTs) navegam como uma formação líder-seguidor, em que a posição do líder é estimada utilizando os sensores a bordo do veículo, enquanto a posição do seguidor é estimada por servo-visão baseada em posição. Para lidar com a...

Robot navigation is still an open research topic, mainly regarding applications that require online planning. In this context, this manuscript presents an implementation of the Lifelong Planning A* (LPA*) search algorithm to guide a mobile robot in an environment that changes along time, by detecting obstacles and updating the current mapping infor...

A novel formation control to transport a cable-suspended payload with two quadrotors is presented. The control structure is based on a layered scheme combining a kinematic null-space based controller and a neural sliding mode controller. The null-space controller is designed to generate velocity references to the quadrotors in the formation, wherea...

The development and the experimental validation of a workbench capable of supporting outdoor flights using basically the affordable commercial quadrotor AR.Drone 2.0 and a personal computer is considered in this article. The text discusses some technical details of the developed system, focusing on how to achieve real-time navigation adopting a sim...

This book aims to bring to the reader an overview of different applications of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) based on more than 20 years of experience working on these interfaces. The author provides a review of the human brain and EEG signals, describing the human brain, anatomically and physiologically, with the objective of showing some of th...

Load transportation by quadrotors and similar aircrafts is a topic of great interest to the robotics community nowadays, most likely due to logistic gains for deliveries of commercial cargo. Aiming at being the first reading for novice researchers and graduate students, this survey highlights meaningful research works of several groups worldwide, c...

Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on static or mobile platforms (such as an unmanned ground vehicle—UGV) is challenging since the UAV should hover exactly over the platform. This article presents a solution to this problem based on the virtual structure control paradigm. The problem is addressed as the control of a heterogeneous formation of...

This work proposes an adaptive dynamic controller to guide an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) when accomplishing trajectory tracking tasks. The controller structure consists of a kinematic controller that generates reference commands to a dynamic compensator in charge of changing the reference commands according to the system dynamics. The final cont...

This work deals with load transportation by quadrotors, when the load is attached to the vehicles through flexible cables. More specifically, two quadrotors are used to carry a single load, which is attached to both vehicles, through such kind of cables. The idea of using two quadrotors working cooperatively to carry the load is adopted to suppress...

This paper deals with a non-contact method to identify the aerodynamic propeller parameters of the Parrot AR.Drone quadrotor. The experimental set consists in a camera recording the vehicle flights, the audio signal is extracted and is used a spectrogram analysis to estimates the propeller velocity. First, the aerial vehicle takes off and starts a...

A new trajectory tracking controller with collision avoidance is proposed in this paper for UAV navigation. A positive potential function is designed to take into account the movement of obstacles. Thus, the controller with potential function guarantees that the UAV moves through areas of potentials close to zero to ensure safe navigation in dynami...

This paper presents a low-cost localization system to guide an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) in indoor flights, considering an environment with invariant texture and typical indoor illumination. The first contribution of the paper is the proposal of a system to estimate the position and orientation of the UAV, through a multi-sensor fusion scheme,...

An important issue in the field of motion control of wheeled mobile robots is that the design of most controllers is based only on the robot’s kinematics. However, when high-speed movements and/or heavy load transportation are required, it becomes essential to consider the robot dynamics as well. The control signals generated by most dynamic contro...

This manuscript presents an application of the multi-layer control scheme to guide a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in positioning and trajectory tracking missions. In such case, each part of the formation control problem is dealt by an individual layer, which is independent module dealing with a specific part of the navigation problem...

This paper proposes a new algorithm for controlling a formation of multiple autonomous aerial vehicles based on multiple control objectives. The strategy includes using the null space of a Jacobian matrix to achieve the different control objectives in a non-conflicting way. The mission is split into two elementary tasks, with suitable command refer...

This paper presents a computational system designed to perform autonomous indoor flights using low-cost equipment. Depending on the mission to be accomplished, one or two Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 quadrotors are supposed to fly in a three-dimensional workspace, guided by the navigation algorithms embedded in the proposed framework, which runs in a ground...

This work describes the development of a platform to deal with simulated and real autonomous flights with rotary-wing aircrafts. Such a platform, referred to as AuRoRA Platform – Autonomous Robots for Research and Applications – contemplates hardware and software, and is designed for use with commercial miniature rotorcrafts, also embedding the ins...

This paper proposes an exponential interpolation to merge a part-of-speech-based language model and a word-based n-gram language model to accomplish word prediction tasks. In order to find a set of mathematical equations to properly describe the language modeling, a model based on partial differential equations is proposed. With the appropriate ini...

This work proposes the representation of the high level dynamic modelling of a formation of two quadrotor UAVs cooperatively carrying a suspended load. The two quadrotors are attached to the load by massless and stretchable cables, which can slack and taut during the task accomplishment. The cable is modeled as a high stiffness spring with a dampin...

In a previous paper we have proposed two new superresolution image reconstruction algorithms, based on a non-parametric numerical integration Bayesian inference method, the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA). Despite achieving superior image reconstruction results compared to other state-of-the-art methods, such algorithms manipulate hu...

This work proposes a Dynamic Bayesian Network approach (BN) to support medical decision making in the problem of beat classification in electrocardiograms. The BN takes the uncertainty into consideration when making a decision every time new evidence is available. Moreover, the certainty related to the beat classification can be controlled through...

This paper concentrates on improving a text-based human-machine interface integrated into a robotic wheelchair. Since word prediction is one of the most common methods used in such systems, the goal of this work is to improve the results using this specific module. For this, an exponential interpolation language model (LM) is considered. First, a m...

This paper presents a method for estimating the orientation and position of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), through processing information provided by a RGB-D sensor and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) in order to inspect predefined points in an indoor environment. A fusion filter is implemented to correct the existing drift position and orien...

This paper describes the application of a low-cost quadrotor testbed in real outdoor flights. Along the text it is discussed how to design a flight control system, including methods for fusing out-of-sequence sensor measurements, for modelling the aircraft and for designing a high level flight controller. To validate the proposed system, some fligh...

This study ranks twelve electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes, located in the parieto-occipital and occipital regions of the human scalp, according to their relevance in the detection of steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP). Monopolar and bipolar arrangements were used to evaluate the capability of these electrodes to improve the signal d...

Introduction Left ventricle hypertrophy (LVH) is an important risk factor for cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. It is characterized by a thickening of the walls of the left ventricle. The transthoracic echocardiogram is a very accurate method for LVH detection. However, the electrocardiogram (ECG) offers an alternative method in diagnosing LV...

This work proposes the representation of the high level dynamicmodel of a quadrotor UAVwith a suspended load, through Euler-Lagrange equations. The rotorcraft movement is restricted to the XZ plane of the Cartesian space, so that it performs like a PVTOL machine. A nonlinear controller is proposed to stabilize the quadrotor and the load, during pos...

This work proposes an obstacle avoidance strategy for UAV navigation in indoor environments. The proposal is able to compute the distance among the UAV and the obstacles (which change their position dynamically), and then to select the closest one. When a collision risk is pointed out, the algorithm establish some escape points, whose orientation i...

This paper proposes a 3D data capture system, based on the fusion of data coming from an active depth sensor and a inertial measurement unit (IMU), to determine the position of an aerial unmanned vehicle (UAV) in indoor environments, for control purposes. Firstly, the method adopted to detect the vehicle through using a sequence of RGB-D images. Af...

This paper presents a framework to deal with outdoor navigation using an AR.Drone Parrot quadrotor. The proposed system runs in a centralized computer, the ground station, responsible for the communication with the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and for synthesizing the control signals during flight missions. The outdoor navigation is performed thro...

A multilayer scheme is here proposed to implement coordinated control of a group of mobile robots. Specifically, a trajectory tracking controller is proposed to coordinately guide a platoon of robots, with an obstacle deviation subsystem based on virtual forces and mechanical impedance implemented in each robot. Such a controller is firstly designe...