This project will take place in the Aerospace Control Lab and will focus on the control of autonomous quadcopters with the aim of designing controllers that can rapidly determine how to adapt flight profiles in order to avoid collisions. Upon the identification of an obstacle in a UAV’s flight path, different collision-avoidance procedures might be executed. Candidate controllers would produce flexible object-avoidance maneuvers based both on the desired flight characteristics and on the characteristics of the maneuver itself. The project will work on the extension of the existing control framework of Dynamic Movement Primitives, which is able to generate trajectories with certain desired characteristics, such that it can also produce flexible, parameterized avoidance maneuvers.

I have always had a deep interest in aerospace controls and have focused my studies on control systems. I have past project experience in modeling and implementing control systems and hope to bring that experience to the task of designing controllers for the purpose of collision avoidance. I am excited to build on my past experience to gain a deeper knowledge of the design of controllers for autonomous quadcopters.