Advances in Fast MPC & Constrained MRAC for Aerial Robotics - Prof. Andrea L’Afflitto
Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide invaluable support to law enforcement agencies involved in complex and potentially hazardous operations, such as surveying unknown and potentially hostile environments and installing sensors in remote locations. Enabling autonomy for these complex missions requires creating new theoretical results, which are also computationally efficient. In this seminar, Dr. L’Afflitto will present a unique optimization-based guidance system for autonomous UAVs tasked with operating in hostile environments without any prior knowledge of the location and capabilities of external threats. Successively, our speaker will present the first extension of the model reference adaptive control architecture to switched dynamical systems within the Carathéodory and the Filippov framework. The applicability of these results will be shown by numerical simulations and flight tests involving multi-rotor UAVs.
Bio: Dr. Andrea L’Afflitto is an associate professor with the Grado Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and an affiliate professor with the Departments of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and the National Security Institute at Virginia Tech. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in aerospace engineering from the University of Napoli ``Federico II,'' an M.S. degree in mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2010, and a Ph.D. degree in aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech in 2015. His current research interests include nonlinear robust control, optimal control, and the design of control systems for unmanned aerial systems. Presently, Dr. L’Afflitto serves as the Senior Editor of the Autonomous Systems area for the IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. He is the recipient of several academic awards, including the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2018.
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