Keynote speech 4: Development of intelligent unmanned aerial systems

Abstract

In this talk, we aim to report some advanced unmanned aerial systems (UAS) developed in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. Attention is particularly paid to UAS, which is capable of navigating through in cluttered indoor and outdoor GPS-denied environments, such as hostile buildings, sewer tunnels, radiation contaminated areas and inside forests. Topics under studied include dynamic modelling of an unmanned helicopter, advanced flight control system design, multi-sensory data fusion, real-time simultaneous localization and mapping, and dynamic path planning in unknown environments. We will particularly showcase the development of an unconventional hybrid aircraft, which has the capability of taking off and landing vertically, and transiting to a fixed-wing mode for fast cruise flight. We will also take this opportunity to highlight some techniques that we have recently developed for the 2017 International Micro Air Vehicles (IMAV) Competition, which was held in Toulouse, France, September 18–21, 2017. The IMAV Competition is a yearly event that aims at fostering key technologies for the development of micro-air vehicles. It provides an arena for research groups around the world to showcase their research achievements and to test their results in real environments. Besides the unmanned aerial systems capable of navigating fully autonomously in GPS-denied environments, we have also managed to achieve sophisticated cooperative control and task management of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles for heavy duty missions.