Andrea L'Afflitto – författare

Control of Autonomous Aerial Vehicles is an edited book that provides a single-volume snapshot on the state of the art in the field of control theory applied to the design of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aka “drones”, employed in a variety of applications. The homogeneous structure allows the reader to transition seamlessly through results in guidance, navigation, and control of UAVs, according to the canonical classification of the main components of a UAV’s autopilot.

Each chapter has been written to assist graduate students and practitioners in the fields of aerospace engineering and control theory. The contributing authors duly present detailed literature reviews, conveying their arguments in a systematic way with the help of diagrams, plots, and algorithms. They showcase the applicability of their results by means of flight tests and numerical simulations, the results of which are discussed in detail.

Control of Autonomous AerialVehicles will interest readers who are researchers, practitioners or graduate students in control theory, autonomous systems or robotics, or in aerospace, mechanical or electrical engineering.

Data-Driven, Nonparametric, Adaptive Control Theory introduces a novel approach to the control of deterministic, nonlinear ordinary differential equations affected by uncertainties. The methods proposed enforce satisfactory trajectory tracking despite functional uncertainties in the plant model. The book employs the properties of reproducing kernel Hilbert (native) spaces to characterize both the functional space of uncertainties and the controller''s performance. Classical control systems are extended to broader classes of problems and more informative characterizations of the controllers’ performances are attained.

Following an examination of how backstepping control and robust control Lyapunov functions can be ported to the native setting, numerous extensions of the model reference adaptive control framework are considered. The authors’ approach breaks away from classical paradigms in which uncertain nonlinearities are parameterized using a regressor vector provided a priori or reconstructed online. The problem of distributing the kernel functions that characterize the native space is addressed at length by employing data-driven methods in deterministic and stochastic settings.

The first part of this book is a self-contained resource, systematically presenting elements of real analysis, functional analysis, and native space theory. The second part is an exposition of the theory of nonparametric control systems design. The text may be used as a self-study book for researchers and practitioners and as a reference for graduate courses in advanced control systems design. MATLAB® codes, available on the authors’ website, and suggestions for homework assignments help readers appreciate the implementation of the theoretical results.