Abstract

Since UAVs are agile robots, they have been adopted to solve a diverse range of challenging problems. This talk will introduce the control and challenges of UAV systems such as distributed formation control, SLAM and motion planning for autonomous UAV, distributed cooperative control, tracking control of a moving target with unknown motion. The tracking control presents a method based on applying a DNN for detecting a moving target (e.g., car) undergoing unknown motion and collisions can be avoided using the control barrier functions (CBFs). The main challenges are to control both the relative positions and angles between the target and the UAVs to within desired values, and to guarantee that the generated control inputs to the UAVs are feasible (i.e., within their motion capabilities). Moreover, the UAVs are controlled to ensure that the target always remains within the fields of view of their onboard cameras. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply multiple UAVs to cooperatively track a dynamic target while ensuring that the UAVs remain connected and that both occlusion and collisions are avoided.

Bio.

Teng-Hu Cheng received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA, in 2015. In 2016, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan.  He received the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2015. He also received and 3-year MOST grant for excellent young scholar in 2018, and AIslanders Show-excellent performance from MOST in 2018. His research interests include robotics, autonomous systems, networked system control, switched control, event-driven control, and nonlinear control.

All faculty and students are welcome to join.