Dissertation defence (Robotics and Autonomous Systems): MSc Anam Tahir

Time

29.9.2023 at 12.00 - 16.00
MSc Anam Tahir defends her dissertation in Robotics and Autonomous Systems titled ”Formation Control of Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles” at the University of Turku on 29 September 2023 at 12.00 pm (University of Turku, Lecture Hall XX Agora, 1st floor, Vesilinnantie 3, 20500 Turku).

Opponent: Assistant Professor Azwirman Gusrialdi (Tampere University)
Custos: Professor Juha Plosila (University of Turku)

Doctoral Dissertation at UTUPub: https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-29-9411-3

***

Summary of the Doctoral Dissertation:

This thesis addresses the problem of a distributed formation control that is based on the dynamics of the overall swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles and the local dynamics of each node via implementing the partial controllers i.e., the top-down, bottom-up approach. In a swarm formation, deviations of a node might cause significant unwanted changes in the other nodes’ locations, especially in cases of leader-follower structures.

The objective of this thesis is to design the distributed formation control for swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles, arranged in tightly and loosely coupled architectures, which addresses the challenges of scalability, collision avoidance, failure recovery, energy efficiency, and control performance. The overall system design is based on the formation control of swarms of homogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles in a distributed network of leader-follower and leaderless structures. One of the main contributions is to propose continuous path planning which can quickly react to events. This procedure is defined as the mapping problem, which describes the best shape of the desired swarm formations. Besides this, another main contribution is to maneuver the nodes smoothly. This problem addresses the optimal tracking movement of each node from its initial to final position in a swarm formation.
University Communications