As one type of unmanned aerial vehicles, the quadrotor typically suffers from payload variations, system uncertainties, and environmental wind disturbances, which significantly deteriorate its attitude control performance. To provide high-speed, accurate, and robust attitude tracking performance for the quadrotor, an adaptive fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode (AFNTSM) controller is proposed in this article. The proposed AFNTSM controller combines the advantages of fast nonsingular terminal sliding mode (FNTSM), integral sliding mode, and adaptive estimation techniques, which are effective to achieve the desired tracking performance and suppress control signal chattering. Furthermore, unlike conventional methods, the adaptive estimation removes the requirements for the upper bound information of the disturbances. It is proved that the proposed AFNTSM can guarantee finite-time convergence and zero tracking error for the quadrotor attitude control. Finally, comparative study with the FNTSM control only and conventional sliding mode control is conducted through experiments and the results demonstrate that the proposed AFNTSM can achieve faster convergence and stronger robustness in line with theoretical analysis.

This brief is concerned with integrated autonomous takeoff, target search, task assignment, and tracking using multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments. The problem is to design flight autonomy that is embedded onboard each UAV to enable autonomous flight coordination and distributed tasking. Control logic design based on a finite state automaton model, integrating four modes of operations, namely, the takeoff mode, the fly-to-area of operation mode, the search mode, and the tracking mode, is presented. Different from the state-of-the-art of recent research, this brief provides a preliminary research on the autonomous cooperative takeoff for miniature fixed-wing UAVs, by considering collision avoidance, communication failure, etc. To make UAVs autonomously and cooperatively search roads in the urban environments, an efficient improved search algorithm is proposed based on recent research on the coverage search in the literature. For the target tracking, using geometric relations (relative position, orientations, speed ratio, and minimal turning radius), a systematic algorithm is developed to generate an optimal online path. All the algorithms in this work are developed based on realistic miniature fixed-wing UAV dynamic models. The main focus of the brief is to test the developed control logic and also the algorithms. The proposed framework is evaluated by our 3-D multi-UAV test bed.

Fingerprinting based indoor positioning system (IPS) is gaining more research interest under the umbrella of location-based services. However, existing works have certain limitations in addressing issues such as noisy measurements, high computational complexity, poor generalization ability. In this work, a random vector functional link network based approach is introduced to address these issues. In the proposed system, a subset of informative features from many randomized noisy features are selected to both reduce the computational complexity and boost the generalization ability. Moreover, the feature selector and predictor are jointly learned iteratively in a single framework based on Augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed system is appealing as it can be naturally fit into parallel or distributed computing environment. Extensive realworld indoor localization experiments are conducted on users with smartphone devices and results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the existing approaches.

This article proposes a distributed optimal attitude synchronization control strategy for multiple quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (QUAVs) through the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm. The attitude systems of QUAVs are modeled as affine nominal systems subject to parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. Considering attitude constraints in complex flying environments, a one-to-one mapping technique is utilized to transform the constrained systems into equivalent unconstrained systems. An improved nonquadratic cost function is constructed for each QUAV, which reflects the requirements of robustness and the constraints of control input simultaneously. To overcome the issue that the persistence of excitation (PE) condition is difficult to meet, a novel tuning rule of critic neural network (NN) weights is developed via the concurrent learning (CL) technique. In terms of the Lyapunov stability theorem, the stability of the closed-loop system and the convergence of critic NN weights are proved. Finally, simulation results on multiple QUAVs show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.