Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Control and Applications

Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park, Hokkaido, Japan

(Photo taken by on-board camera on our UAV at Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park, Hokkaido, Spring, 2016)

UAV Research Team has the following three types of UAVs!

Flying-wing-type UAV
PPG-type UAV
Vertical rake-off and landing (VTOL)-type UAV

UAV Research Team (mainly graduate students) will have enjoyed the UAV experiments at Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park, Hokkaido, Japan. Hokkaido is an island at Japan's northern extremity. Low humidity makes the summers pleasant, while in winter you can enjoy... See the website for more information on Hokkaido.

Flying-wing-type UAV

This is our UEC-UAV (unique, exciting, challenging unmanned aerial vehicle) that is a flying-wing-type UAV. Flying-wing-type UAVs are considered as a very high-efficiency UAV. In contrast, their control is extremely difficult since they have basically no vertical stabilizers, i.e., no rudders. Thus, trajectory tracking stabilization of flying-wing-type UAVs is still a challenging problem from a control theory and practice point of view.

For more details, see the YouTube video (below) and the following papers.

M. Yamamoto, Y. Takahashi and K. Tanaka, A Practical Design Approach for Complex Path Tracking Control of a Tailless Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With a Single Pair of Elevons, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Accepted. August 2023 Early Access. DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2023.3300894
K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, A. Iwase, and H. O. Wang, A Rational Polynomial Tracking Control Approach to Unified System Representation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Vol.25, No.2, April 2020. DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2020.2965576
K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, Y. Takahashi, A. Iwase, and H. O. Wang, 3D Flight Path Tracking Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under Wind Environments, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol.68, No.12, pp.11621-11634，Dec. 2019. DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2019.2944879

Aerial shooting (snapshots) during automatic flight control

Camera view from UEC-UAV

We are considering a number of real flight missions using UEC-UAV (unique, exciting, challenging unmanned aerial vehicle) at Taiki Multi-Purpose Aerospace Park, Hokkaido, Japan. The UEC-UAV is automatically controlled via our proposed control framework.

Tracking control and coordinate system

Realization of smart missions

Our research team has successfully applied the fuzzy model-based control to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), particularly, flying-wing type UAVs, that are one of the most difficult and challenging nonlinear control problems. The recent success in controlling a real flying-wing type UAV became the world’s first (theoretically) guaranteed cost stabilizing control (considering the real actuator performance) in real long-distance (more than 50 miles) flying-wing type UAVs. The flying-wing type UAVs are tailless fixed-wing UAVs that have no definite fuselage due to excess enhancement of their flight efficiency. Hence, their control is extremely difficult in comparison with other UAVs control!

Our research results will be used only for Peaceful Purposes.

PPG-type UAV

This is our PPG-type UAV with an extremely tough body. We succeeded also in automatic landing to the pin-point runway.

For more details, see the YouTube video (below) and the following papers.

M. Tanaka, K. Tanaka and H. O. Wang, Practical Model Construction and Stable Control of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With a Parafoil-Type Wing, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics:Systems, vol.49, no.6, pp.1291-1297, June 2019. DOI: 10.1109/TSMC.2017.270739
K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, Y. Takahashi and H. O. Wang, A Waypoint Following Control Design for a Paraglider Model with Aerodynamic Uncertainty, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol.23, no.2, pp.518-523, April 2018. DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2017.2728678

Automatic control + automatic landing of a powered paraglider (PPG)

Automatic landing photo

VTOL-type UAV

Smart UAV missions using a vertical rake-off and landing (VTOL)-type UAV are now going on!

Our targets are:

detailed modeling for the VTOL dynamics,
state-of-the-art nonlinear control system design and analysis,
realization of smart missions through real experiments.

In our opinion, UAV control studies have to be evaluated through real long-distance (at least kilometers) flight experiments. Even if a designed controller works perfectly only in simulations, the UAV control does not always succeed in real long-distance flight experiments. In fact, most of the control studies have provided only simulation results. We have experienced that even if control schemes work perfectly in simulations, they have some difficulties in implementation and/or real flight safety. Even in a few studies dealing with experiments, only specific environments (indoor, no long-distance flight (less than several kilometers), etc.) have been considered. In this project, we will provide a new nonlinear control framework for a nonlinear VTOL model and will show its utility in long-distance flight experiments.

VTOL flight photo is here!

VTOL flight under strong wind condition

VTOL acrobatic flight under strong wind condition

Recent Publications on UAV Control

-Y. Takahashi, M. Yamamoto, K. -Y. Wong, Y. -J. Chen and K. Tanaka, Guaranteed Cost-based Disturbance Observer and Controller Design for Path Tracking Control of a Powered Paraglider Under Unknown Rudder Trim and Wind Disturbances, IEEE Access, Vol. 12, pp.63655-63668, May 2024.
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3396464 DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3396464 Impact Factor 3.9

- M. Yamamoto, Y. Takahashi and K. Tanaka, A Practical Design Approach for Complex Path Tracking Control of a Tailless Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With a Single Pair of Elevons, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Accepted. August 2023 Early Access. DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2023.3300894 Impact Factor 6.4

- K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, A. Iwase, and H. O. Wang, A Rational Polynomial Tracking Control Approach to Unified System Representation for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics,vol.25, no.2, pp.919-930, April 2020. DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2020.2965576 Impact Factor 4.943

- K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, Y. Takahashi, A. Iwase, and H. O. Wang, 3D Flight Path Tracking Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles under Wind Environments, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, Vol.68, No.12, pp.11621-11634，Dec. 2019. DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2019.2944879 Impact Factor 5.339

- M. Tanaka, K. Tanaka and Hua O. Wang, Practical Model Construction and Stable Control of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With a Parafoil-Type Wing, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics:Systems, , vol.49, no.6, pp.1291-1297, June 2019. Impact Factor 7.351

- K. Tanaka, M. Tanaka, Y. Takahashi and Hua O. Wang, A Waypoint Following Control Design for a Paraglider Model with Aerodynamic Uncertainty, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol.23, no.2, pp.518-523, April 2018. Impact Factor 4.943

- M. Tanaka, Y. Chen, K. Tanaka, H. O. Wang, A Simple Passive Attitude Stabilizer for Palm-size Aerial Vehicles, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Vol.21, No.1, pp.591-597, Feb. 2016. Impact Factor 4.943

- M Tanaka, H Kawai, K Tanaka, H. O. Wang, Development of an autonomous flying robot and its verification via flight control experiment, 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 4439-4444 2013

- M Tanaka, K Yamaguchi, D Ogura, YJ Chen, K Tanaka, Nonlinear Control of F16 Aircraft via Multiple Nonlinear Model Generation for Any Trimmed Equilibriums, International Journal of Fuzzy Systems 16 (2), 140-152 2014. Impact Factor 3.085

- N Hara, K Tanaka, H Ohtake, H. O. Wang, Development of a flying robot with a pantograph-based variable wing mechanism, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 25 (1), 79-87 2009. Impact Factor 6.483

For more publications, see here.