In this paper, the cooperative navigation issue is investigated for a group of robots. A distributed estimation architecture fusing range and visual measurements is proposed. Both the relative range and co-observed features are utilized to construct direct and indirect geometric constraints between robots respectively. To solve the difficult problem of calculating the cross covariance between local estimators, the covariance intersection (CI) algorithm is adopted to design a fully distributed and scalable cooperative estimator. To avoid unnecessary data transmission in feature matching process between different robots, a frustum view overlapping prediction algorithm is developed, which works effectively on reducing data transmission. Compared with existing algorithm, the proposed estimator achieves better accuracy with lower communication cost.

In order to realize transition flight from air to water, trajectory optimization and tracking problem is investigated for morphing cross-domain unmanned vehicle (MCDUV). To satisfy the stealth and water entry requirement, terminal velocity, sink rate, terminal attitude, flight altitude boundary, and shape configuration constraints are considered to generate nominal optimized trajectories based on Radau pseudo spectrum method. To fast and precisely track the nominal trajectory of MCDUV under model uncertainties, a reliable trajectory tracking control framework incorporating control contraction metric (CCM) is designed. Finally, the nonlinear numerical simulation is conducted to veri$\mathbf{fy}$the proposed method. The simulation results demonstrate that the flight trajectory and states of MCDUV realized by using the designed controller under various model uncertainties can meet the water entry requirement.

This paper investigates the remote state estimation issue for the jump Markov nonlinear systems (JMNLSs) with the stochastic event-triggered transmission strategy. For the purpose of saving the scarce network resources, the stochastic event-triggered communication is employed to cut down the number of measurement transmission. The interacting multiple model (IMM) scheme is incorporated due to its strength in alleviating computational burden encountered in the multiple model state estimation problem. In addition, the estimated measurement is utilized to update the mode probability in IMM-based filter when the current measurement is not available to the remote estimators. The proposed algorithm is applied in a two-dimensional maneuvering target tracking problem and the simulation results are presented, which validates the usefulness of the developed scheme.

In this paper, a low-cost vision-based autonomous landing architecture for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on a moving platform is presented. First, a novel landing pad was designed for a monocular camera to robustly detect the pad in both high and low altitudes. In order to solve mirror effect and occasional misidentification, a 3D points cluster algorithm for relative position estimation is presented. Second, the dynamics of the quadrotor is simplified for this lading task and a PD controller is designed based on the estimated relative position. Finally, the low-cost system architecture of the quadrotor and the experiment results are both presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this paper, the weighted average consensus-based unscented Kalman filtering combined with event-triggered communication mechanism is developed. Each sensor node chooses to transmit its latest measurement update to the corresponding remote estimator based on its own event-triggering condition. A sufficient condition is derived to guarantee that the estimation error is bounded in mean square. Finally, an illustrative example is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

For the missile system with external disturbances and parametric uncertainties, the problem of composite anti-disturbance autopilot design is considered with angle constraint. First, a nonlinear disturbance observer is designed for missile system. Second, using dynamic surface control technique, a composite anti-disturbance autopilot is developed for missile systems. Third, the stability analysis is given by Lyapunov function theory and the uniform ultimate boundedness is obtained for the closed-loop system signals. Finally, a simulation result is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this work, an autonomous surveillance system providing ultra wide angle (UWA) video information is presented using multi-UAV platform. Towards this end, a fleet of UAVs are initially deployed into appropriate formation (such as triangle, diamond, or line) with cameras pointing outwards to cover the region of interest (ROI). In aid of image processing technique, the UAVs formation will be further optimized using temporal as well as spatial information to achieve a decent overlap (20% is defined in this work from both information adequacy and utilization efficiency perspective) between any two adjacent video sources. Thereafter, videos separately captured will be stitched together forming an UWA video by extracting and matching feature points in the base station. Notably, a vision-feedback-formation-control (VFFC) closed-loop framework is proposed for better performance. In the end, an experiment is elaborated to illustrate the UWA video generated by the proposed system.