Ionel STANCULEANU

Title: Contributions to the Development of the Trajectory Control Systems of UAVs

Supervisor: Professor Theodor BORANGIU

Start date: 2009

The first applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have been developed in the military field, where they were used to perform tasks that could endanger the lives of pilots. In the last decade the research into UAVs has intensified and led to UAV's with the application also in the civil domain such as: environmental monitoring, surveillance of active volcanoes, checking electrical energy transmission networks, searching for missing persons.

The PhD thesis addresses the problem of UAV’s trajectory control focusing on two main areas: path planning and trajectory generation. During the research study we will track the performance of currently used algorithms in UAVs trip planning and trajectory generation. We will take into consideration the improvement of their performance on computing time used for the implementation of algorithms, optimization of generated solutions, their capabilities to respond to the changing context in which UAV's work, respecting the real time constraints.

From a practical perspective, the thesis is focused on applying the results obtained on a quadrotor platform type.