20 Years of Aerobatic Flight with Autonomous Air Vehicles

ABSTRACT: The past 20 years have seen a remarkable evolution of the drone technology. Back in 1997, academia had to deal with heavy, bulky and expensive machines powered by cranky internal combustion engines. Unmanned vehicles today are a lot cheaper, lighter, and reliable, making them a lot more approachable by students and faculty alike. After tracing our research back to the late 1990s, this talk will introduce an aerobatic drone capable of producing reduced- or zero-gravity conditions at an affordable cost. The platform is still a prototype, but it captures most of the difficulties faced by the larger platform of our dreams. The controller design will be discussed, and a full non-linear maneuver stability analysis will be presented that mixes the concept of transverse dynamics with well-known concepts from robust control. This is joint work with John Hauser (U. Colorado, Boulder) and Pablo Afman (Georgia Tech)

BIO: Eric Feron is a professor at Georgia Tech, where he directs the Decision and Control Laboratory. His basic training is in applied mathematics, computer science, and operations research. His interests include aerospace systems and robotics. Noteworthy achievements include an airport congestion control algorithm now used at many major airports (1999), the first aerobatic autonomous air vehicle (2001), the english translation of Étienne Bézout’s General Theory of Algebraic Equations (2006), and a course on cyber-physical systems offered by Georgia Tech as part of its Online Master of Science in Computer Science (2017).

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