Electrically excited synchronous motors (EESMs) without installing slip rings and brushes are drawing increasing attention in the electric vehicle (EV) propulsion systems. To improve the control performance of the EV EESMs with uncertain mutual inductance, which works under low control frequency (LCF), this paper proposes a novel segmented-prediction-based finite control set model predictive current control (FCS-MPCC) strategy. First, a sliding mode (SM) observer is constructed to identify the mutual inductance, with its stability and robustness against parameter mismatch analyzed. By using the estimated mutual inductance, the accurate EESM model used for FCS-MPCC is established, Second, the segmented prediction algorithms are developed to reduce the prediction errors caused by local linearization in the LPF situations. Finally, the proposed mutual inductance identification and high-performance control techniques are verified by experiment, which is conducted on a 580-W EESM drive system.

In the application of coal mining belt conveyors, dual-motor drives based on permanent magnet motors (PMM) are gaining increasing attention now. To achieve high-performance coordination control of the two motors, this paper proposes a finite control set model predictive speed control (FCS-MPSC) method to improve the dynamics and speed tracking performance of the motors. First, the features of the dual-motor drives used in conveyor belts are analyzed. On this basis, the requirements of the control strategies are illustrated. Second, a master-slave control strategy is developed after treating the PMMs at the tail end and head end as the master motor and slave motor, respectively. Third, the FCS-MPSC method is developed for both master and slave motors by using new predicting model. In this process, the issue that the speed property is not directly related to the manipulated variables are tackled. Moreover, in order to further improve the dynamics of the slave motor, a speed reference compensation strategy is proposed. Finally, the proposed FCS-MPSC method is validated through comparative simulation results.

Due to its great efficiency, scalability, and inclusivity, distributed cooperative learning control has gotten a lot of attention. For complex uncertain multiagent systems, it is challenging to model the uncertainties and exploit the cooperative learning ability of the systems. To address these issues, we proposed a novel convex temporal convolutional network-based distributed cooperative learning control for uncertain discrete-time nonlinear multiagent systems. A new concept of using a convex temporal convolutional network (CTCNet) is proposed for estimating the uncertain agent dynamics in a cooperative way. Unlike previous methods that require adjustment of network weights for different control tasks, the proposed CTCNet can map the high-dimensional input-output space into a deep space spanned by basis features that represent the inherent properties of the system, so it has good robustness for different tasks. Consequently, to improve the control performance, a CTCNet-based distributed cooperative learning control method that shares learned knowledge through the communication topology among adaptive laws of CTCNet is proposed. Furthermore, the asymptotic convergence of system tracking errors to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of the origin is strictly proved. Finally, the simulation results are given to illustrate that our suggested method has higher control accuracy, stronger robustness, and anti-interference ability than the existing methods.

Insulator visual aiming is difficult for washing drone due to the complex washing environment, strong dis-turbance, lack of debugging environment, and other factors. Conventional visual servo control methods often fail to consider these complex factors adequately and fall short in reliable insulator visual aiming. To address these problems, we propose a novel multi-feature fusion-based drone visual servo control method for accurate insulator visual aiming. A multi-feature fusion neural network (MFFNet) is proposed to map the dif-ferent input modalities into an embedding space spanned by the learned deep features. Suitable control commands are generated by the simple combination of learned deep features. These deep features represent the intrinsic structural properties of the insulator and the motion pattern of the drones. Particularly, our method is trained purely in simulation and transferred to a real drone directly. Moreover, accurate visual aiming is guaranteed even in strong disturbance environments. Simulation and experimental results verify the high accurate insulator aiming, anti-disturbance, and sim-to-real transfer capabilities of the proposed method. Video: https://youtu.be/Ptlajzvp46A.

Disturbance mainly caused by recoil force in-evitably makes washing drone seriously deviate from the desired position, thereby reducing the cleaning efficiency. It is neces-sary to develop an effective anti-disturbance control method. Although some progresses have been made, the position error thereof is still large, rendering existing methods inapplicable in washing drone. In this paper, we propose a learning-based anti-disturbance control (LADC) method to significantly reduce the position error by combining robust nonlinear control and partial differential equation network (PDENet). Taking data noise into account, we use differential spectral normalization in the training of the PDENet. A distinguishing feature of our method is to directly learn PDENet parameters from flight logs without installing extra sensors. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms classical PD method and extended state observer (ESO) based control method with 70 % and 50 % reduced position error, respectively, and can be further applied in variable scenarios. Video: https: / / youtu.be/gNfLFAXalkI

Helicopters are complex high-order and time-varying nonlinear systems, strongly coupling with aerodynamic forces, engine dynamics, and other phenomena. Therefore, it is a great challenge to investigate system identification for dynamic modeling and adaptive control for helicopters. In this paper, we address the system identification problem as dynamic regression and propose to represent the uncertainties and the hidden states in the system dynamic model with a deep convolutional neural network. Particularly, the parameters of the network are directly learned from the real flight data of aerobatic helicopter. Since the deep convolutional model has a good performance for describing the dynamic behavior of the hidden states and uncertainties in the flight process, the proposed identifier manifests strong robustness and high accuracy, even for untrained aerobatic maneuvers. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by various experiments with the real-world flight data from the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter Project. Consequently, an adaptive flight control scheme including a deep convolutional identifier and a backstepping-based controller is presented. The stability of the flight control scheme is rigorously proved by the Lyapunov theory. It reveals that the tracking errors for both the position and attitude of unmanned helicopter asymptotic converge to a small neighborhood of the origin.

This poster presents GuideLoc, a highly efficient aerial wireless localization system that uses directional antennas mounted on a mini Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), to enable detecting and positioning of targets. Taking advantage of angle and signal strength information of frames transmitted from targets, GuideLoc can directly fly towards the targets with the minimum flight route and time. We implement a prototype of GuideLoc using ArduCopter and evaluate the performance by simulations and experiments. Experimental results show that GuideLoc achieves an average location accuracy of 2.7 meters and reduces flight distance more than 50% compared with other known wireless localization approaches using UAV.