Description:

The course offers the introduction to multirotor autonomous aerial systems (UAV). Standard senzors and principles of estimate and control of UAV will be introduced. The problems of motion planning, path planning, localization, mapping and exploration will be discussed for sigle moving UAV as well as multiple UAVs moving in a formation.

Contents:

1. Autonomous aerial system, architectures and taxonomies (sensors, actuators, applications; fixed wing, multirotor, VTOL - convertibles, ...)
2. Multirotor helicopter dynamics model, control, motion planning
3. Multirotor helicopter state estimation and localization
4. Single aerial robot mapping and planning
5. Multi-robot architectures and taxonomies (centralized, decentralized and distributed...).
6. Multi-robot planning, mapping and exploration
7. Formation control (leader-follower, virtual structures, time-varying topology, connectivity maintenance, pursuit - evader, steady-state and bearing-based formations)
8. Behavior-based systems (swarm robotics, bio-inspired flocking algorithms)
9. Cooperative localization of team members (nearby robots)
10. Communication architectures and communication issues in reactive multi-robot systems
11. Failure detection, recovery, reconfiguration in aerial systems
12. Transportation and manipulation by aerial robots
13. Task assignment, consensus, collective decision-making
14. Multi-robot learning - Learning to coordinate

Seminar contents:

Students work on practical tasks from teachers.

Recommended literature:

Siciliano, B. and Khatib, O. (2016) Springer handbook of robotics. Springer.
Topics related directly to multirotor aerial platforms may be studied from
Franck Cazaurang Kelly Cohen Manish Kumar (2020) Multi-rotor Platform Based UAV Systems. Elsevier.
An overview of swarming approaches can be found in
Heiko Hamann (2018) Swarm Robotics: A Formal Approach. Springer.
Classical graph-based approaches designed for multi-robot systems can be found in
Mesbahi, M. and Egerstedt, M. (2010) Graph theoretic methods in multiagent networks. Princeton University Press.

Keywords:

Multirobotic systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)

Abbreviations used:

Semester:

• W ... winter semester (usually October - February)
• S ... spring semester (usually March - June)
• W,S ... both semesters

Mode of completion of the course:

• A ... Assessment (no grade is given to this course but credits are awarded. You will receive only P (Passed) of F (Failed) and number of credits)
• GA ... Graded Assessment (a grade is awarded for this course)
• EX ... Examination (a grade is awarded for this course)
• A, EX ... Examination (the award of Assessment is a precondition for taking the Examination in the given subject, a grade is awarded for this course)

Weekly load (hours per week):

• P ... lecture
• C ... seminar
• L ... laboratory
• R ... proseminar
• S ... seminar