This paper investigates the modeling and control of an aerial flight platform built with a quadrotor for assisting in the landing of fixed-wing UAVs. During the process of landing on the aerial flight platform, the lift force of the fixed-wing UAV decreases with the decrease in airspeed. Therefore, the aerial platform will bear additional force and torque disturbance, which seriously affects the attitude stability of the aerial flight platform. The existing methods are difficult to maintain the stability of the aerial flight platform under such strong disturbances. To solve this problem, we propose a novel modeling and control method for the aerial flight platform. First, we consider the aerial flight platform and the fixed-wing

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

When multiple quadrotors fly in a cluttered environment, collision-free flight must be assured. In this paper, we propose a novel elastic safety clearance based model predictive control (ESC-MPC) for multiple maneuverable quadrotors to avoid collisions in the presence of disturbance. This is accomplished through leveraging tube based model predictive control to maintain the quadrotor in a tube of trajectories. Exponential control barrier function (ECBF) is integrated to realize the elastic safety clearance mechanism which offers a dynamic safety margin in maneuverable flight. We validate the superiority of our approach with laboratory experiments.