Speaker: Dr. Sarvat M. Ahmad
Associate Professor
Control and Instrumentation Engineering Department

King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals

Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Date: Tuesday,10 December 2024
Time: 2:30 PM
Location: 22-134

Abstract:

In this work, a 3-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) static quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) test-rig of a pendulum-type configuration is custom-designed, developed, instrumented, and interfaced with a PC. The rig serves as a test bed to develop high-fidelity mathematical models as well as to investigate autopilot designs and real-time closed-loop controllers’ performances. The Simulink Desktop Real-Time software is employed for the quadcopter’s attitude signals acquisition and real-time implementation of closed-loop controllers on a target microcontroller hardware. The mathematical models for pitch, roll, and yaw axes are derived via first principle and validated with the experimental linear system identification (SI) techniques. Subsequently, employing the multi-parameter root contour technique, the classical PID controllers are designed and implemented in real-time on the quadcopter UAV test rig. This served as a benchmark controller for comparing it with an integral-based LQR controller. Further, to improve the transient response of the LQR controller, a novel robust integral-based LQR controller with a feedforward term (LQR-FF) is implemented, which shows much superior performance than the benchmark and basic LQR controller. This work thus will act as a precursor for a more complex 3-DoF autopilot design of an untethered quadcopter.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Sarvat M Ahmad received his Ph.D. from the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering, University of Sheffield, UK, May 2001. He has held post-doctoral positions at the University of Plymouth and University of Manchester, United Kingdom. He was the recipient of the prestigious Denny Medal awarded by The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology, UK in 2010 for the paper titled “Pure pursuit guidance and model predictive control of an autonomous underwater vehicle for cable/pipeline tracking”.

He is a Chartered Engineer (IMechE, UK) who after working for several years in cutting-edge mechatronics industries in the UK returned to academia. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Control & Instrumentation Engineering Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Saudi Arabia. His research interests are in the areas of dynamics, system identification, and robust control with application to unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and active magnetic bearings. To date, he has authored or co-authored more than 50 journal and conference papers.

All Faculty, Researchers, and Graduate Students are invited to attend.