The ACTUAS team participated in HESTEMP’s 3rd Annual May Conference.
Below are the links and abstracts of our students’ projects.
1. Autonomous Control Technologies – Unmanned Aerial Systems (ACTUAS) Fixed-Wing Drone & Quadcopter
Jeffrey Chen, Christy Chock, Sean Tadekawa, Chris Rieta, Kevin Williams
University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) will be deployed for agricultural applications for Kauai Coffee Company (KCC), which contains four million coffee trees spanning 3100 acres. ACTUAS follows a systems engineering approach where its mission is to design a fixed-wing drone (FWD) to survey KCC’s fields with multispectral cameras to analyze tree growth rate. MATLAB simulates the drone’s quadratic relationship of thrust and velocity. The FWD assembled is the My Twin Dream with separate cameras used for analysis and flight. Mission Planner analyzes flight data and conducts waypoint navigation. Upon completion, ACTUAS can be expanded for similar applications.
2. PID Tuning Methods for Quadrotor UAVs
Reese Bastardo
Moanalua High School
Inoperable satellites, dead payloads, and empty rockets are all examples of pieces of space debris cluttering Earth’s atmosphere. With millions of pieces of space debris it is important to be able to track and catalog the positions and orbits of space debris to ensure the safety of working satellites and other spacecrafts. Through using the orbital elements it was possible to catalog and track space debris allowing a safer passage for future space missions and satellites, and ensuring the safety of current satellites.
3. The Effects of Physical Parameters on Quadcopter UAVs
Kammi Matsumoto
Moanalua High School
A quadcopter is simulated with constant PID coefficients while changing the length to determine a range of lengths for these PID coefficients. A MATLAB simulation determines gamma and compares it to the max gamma and torques for a predetermined length. It is impossible if the experimental torque is greater than the maximum torque for the PID coefficients. Quaternions eliminate the singularities that result from using roll, pitch, and yaw and can be extended to determine the classical Rodrigues parameters. Possible future studies PID control could be used on Rodrigues parameters based on the direction cosine matrix for the (313) sequence.
Created by Olivia Kwon Presented by Kammi Matsumoto
Moanalua High School
The 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th derivatives of the aircraft equations of motion are determined to compute the velocity, acceleration, jerk and snap vectors. These vectors are presented as functions of the flight path angle and time. The analytical solutions for each of the derivatives can be used when expressing these vectors in terms of the flight path angle. The magnitudes of the jerk and snap vectors allow us to study the noise profile in terms of flight path angle and time. This analysis can be extended to reducing noise in other vehicles such as quadcopters.
Evan Kawamura
University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
This study aims to develop targeting, guidance, navigation, and control functions and their integration for applications, and the goal of the research study is to create a framework for autonomous control technology for unmanned aerial vehicles with real-time target-relative guidance capabilities. Optimal control formulation leads to trivial and nontrivial cases for finding state and co-state vectors. Explicit guidance is modified and integrated with optimal control for a quadcopter. Two illustrative examples, traveling to a point of interest at an agricultural field and performing a roll maneuver, are considered to demonstrate the utility of guidance, navigation, and control functions.
