January 12, 2012, ESB 2001

In this talk the modelling, control design and prototyping of a Ducted-Fan Miniature Aerial Vehicle interacting with the environment is presented. This research activity is framed in the context of the European Project AIRobots (www.airobots.eu) briefly presented during the talk. The vision is to develop unmanned aerial vehicles capable to accomplish tasks that may require contacts between the aerial vehicle and the environment such as remote manipulation, docking and flight in cluttered environments. We present a framework in which the system operating in the different operative modes is described as an hybrid automata and controlled through hybrid states by means of nonlinear path following strategies. Robust docking and undocking aerial maneuvers will be formulated as a nonlinear control problem over the hybrid automata. An impedance force control law able to govern all the degree-of-freedom of the unmanned aerial vehicle while interacting with the environment is also presented along with experimental results.

Lorenzo Marconi graduated in 1995 in Electrical Engineering from the University of Bologna. Since 1995 he has been with the Department of Electronics, Computer Science and Systems at University of Bologna, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in March 1998. From 1999 he has been an Assistant Professor in the same Department where is now Associate Professor since January 2005. He has held visiting positions at various academic/research international institutions. He is co-author of more than 100 technical publications on the subject of linear and nonlinear feedback design published on international journals, books and conference proceedings. In 2005, he received the "Outstanding Application Paper Award" from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) for a co-authored paper published on Automatica. He is member of the IEEE Control System Society, of the Control System Society Conference Editorial Board and of IFAC Technical Committees on \Nonlinear Control Systems" and \Safety and Supervision in Technical Processes". His current research interests include nonlinear control, output regulation, control of autonomous vehicles, fault detection and isolation, fault tolerant control.