Control of Aerial Robots: Hybrid Force and Position Feedback for a Ducted Fan

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) attract the interest of many fields of engineering, including control, aerospace and aeronautics, electronics, and materials. The research interest in the area of control engineering is mainly focused on the control of the vehicle, in a fully autonomous way or with a partial human supervision, to fly through prespecified paths 1, to synchronize with other vehicles to form coordinated fleets 2, to perform acrobatic maneuvers 3, to reconstruct unknown environments 4, and to perform other operations. Indeed, research in the field is driven by domains of application in which UAVs are typically employed, such as surveillance and data acquisition in areas that are dangerous for human operators and inaccessible to ground vehicles. Many civil 5, 6 and military 7, 8 applications show their use in these contexts. The ability to fly within possibly unstructured environments explains why UAVs are also referred to as flying robots (see 9, Chap. 44), a terminology inspired by ground robots, the latter identifying vehicles moving autonomously on the ground (see 9, Chap. 17).