Date of Award

Fall 11-22-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering

Organizational Unit

Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Kimon P. Valavanis

Second Advisor

Matthew J. Rutherford

Third Advisor

Alvaro Arias

Fourth Advisor

Haluk Ogmen

Fifth Advisor

Rui Fan

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

All Rights Reserved
All Rights Reserved.

Keywords

Adaptive control, Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), Optimal control, Reinforcement learning

Abstract

In recent decades, unmanned systems, particularly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have seen significant advancement and unprecedented growth in military, civilian and public domain applications. Scientists have focused on enhancing UAV navigation and control through cutting-edge technologies and support tools. UAVs find applications in many fields, except military, such as agriculture, infrastructure inspection, wildlife monitoring, search and rescue, emergency response, border protection, to name but a few relevant civilian applications. Given the faster-than-exponential increase of available computational power, learning-based algorithms have emerged as a prominent tool for (real-time) multirotor UAV navigation and control. This dissertation centers around the fusion of conventional control methods with learning algorithms to fine-tune and/or identify and estimate multirotor UAV aerodynamic parameters (model parameters), as well as controller parameters and gains, also tackling uncertainties. The combined multilayer navigation control architecture, based on obtained results, shows promise as it is real-time applicable and implementable.

Copyright Date

3-2025

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Serhat Sönmez

Provenance

Received from author

File Format

application/pdf

Language

English (eng)

Extent

143 pgs

File Size

8.8 MB



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