Prof. Rita Cunha
Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa – Portugal

Title: Advances in Motion Control of Aerial Vehicles

Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly evolving to become highly capable sensing platforms that can navigate and track trajectories with great accuracy and precision. While the motion control of UAVs in free flight is reaching its maturity, new challenges are being embraced that involve interaction with the environment and cooperation between multiple vehicles. In this talk, I will first give a brief overview of past work on trajectory tracking and path following control of quadrotor vehicles, which builds on Lyapunov stability theory to provide stabilizing control laws with wide if not global regions of attractions. I will then present developments related to three topics of research: i) formation planning and control for multi-vehicle systems; ii) visual servoing control using optical flow measurements, and iii) and motion planning and control for slung-load aerial transportation.

Brief Biography: Prof. Rita Cunha received the Licenciatura degree in Information Systems and Computer Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, in 1998 and 2007, respectively. She is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of IST and a researcher with the Institute for Systems and Robotics, LARSyS, Lisbon. Her research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems and control, multi-agent systems, cooperative control, optimal control and model predictive control applied to multi-vehicle trajectory generation, and vision-based control with application to autonomous aerial vehicles.