Hui Chen - IEEE Xplore Author Profile

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Research in aerial swarms have gained traction in recent years and there appears to be a lack of user-friendly frameworks with a focus on bringing swarm UAVs from simulation to actual flight. Furthermore, spatial constraints and resource challenges hinder the validation of larger-scale swarm algorithms. To tackle these issues, we propose Gestelt, a relatively lightweight framework that accelerates...Show More
The UAV flight control tasks, especially their stabilities under large disturbances, are always complex and troublesome. In many application environments, drones are subject to both external interference and internal structural changes, which greatly affects the tracking accuracy. In this paper, an AI-based nonlinear control strategy was presented for unmanned aerial vehicles to achieve accurate t...Show More
The main purpose of drone flight is to find an optimal path without colliding with obstacles. The key point is to design a search algorithm. Path planning for searching a 2-dimensional (2D) map has been studied extensively and reached a mature stage. For a higher-dimensional configuration space, it is quite challenging. In this paper, a sampling based path planning method is proposed. It uses the ...Show More
The main contribution of this paper is to present a control scheme that can be used to handle both actuator and sensor faults. The proposed control uses neural networks to learn faulty behaviors and compensate the effects of faults in multi-rotors. Experimental test has been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.Show More
The application and evolution of multi-agent algorithms to the domain of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones will enable swarms of heterogeneous agents with emergent behaviour that dynamically and optimally respond to changes in the environment and resources to complete heterogeneous tasks in multi-objective missions. A key enabler of this capability is task allocation, but the state of the ...Show More
Quadrotor has been applied for various civil aviation and military services. Since its wide applications, this raises a safety concern. In this paper, we present a fault-tolerant control (FTC) scheme that can be used to handle GPS faults. The proposed control uses neural networks to learn dynamical behaviors and estimate the GPS. Simulation studies have been given to illustrate the effectiveness o...Show More
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have become ubiquitous in the recent years. Collision avoidance is a critical component of path planning, allowing multi-agent networks of cooperative UAVs to work together towards common objectives while avoiding each other. We implemented, integrated and evaluated the effectiveness of using a low cost, wide angle monocular camera with real-tim...Show More
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming one of the most versatile robots working with various sensors such as camera, Lidar and GPS. This trend comes from the numerous studies in the network of UAVs and the control domain. Currently, coverage control, the control of UAVs to cover a given region, is an important problem in the study of multi-UAV networks. In this paper, an existing coverage co...Show More
We conducted real proof-of-concept demonstrations of an auto-organizing sensor network composed of UAVs and ground cameras, for urban surveillance. We adopted a decentralised paradigm with tightly coupled perception and tactical behaviour algorithms. The network would reconfigure when cameras are added or removed so that high priority tasks are always served. Tracked targets could be handed over f...Show More
In this paper, we consider the problem of formation control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAVs). Based on a self-organizing approach, we propose a solution for both circle and arbitrary polygon formations. The proposed solution is a distributed one only using the neighbouring UAV information. Simulation is conducted to verify two types of the formations as well as UAV failure and re-forma...Show More
In this paper, a novel motion planning approach is proposed for high-speed flight of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in unknown cluttered environment using a stereo camera as unique sensor. The proposed motion planning works directly on a depth map which represents partial surrounding environment due to limited field of view (FOV) of the stereo camera. The depth map updates at each sampling time. An opt...Show More
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) need to dynamically re-plan paths online to avoid newly detected obstacles and no-fly zones. Existing 3D path planning methods are either too computationally intensive for online use or have practical limitations for actual applications. We propose a new method based on visibility graphs that is both computationally efficient for online use and is suitabl...Show More
Multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are now able to complete a wide range of applications. The de-confliction of flight plans of multiple UAVs is essential in providing conflict-free plans for greater efficiency in completing the missions. Centralized de-confliction approaches have been proposed but they are limited by the requirement of a central agency. Therefore, this paper introduces a no...Show More
This paper presents a sophisticated vision-aided flocking system for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is able to operate in GPS-denied unknown environments for exploring and searching missions, and also able to adopt two types of vision sensors, day and thermal cameras, to measure relative motion between UAVs in different lighting conditions without using wireless communication. In order to ...Show More
Multiple Unmanned Multirotors (MUM) systems are becoming a reality. They have a wide range of applications such as for surveillance, search, and rescue, monitoring operations in hazardous environment and providing communications coverage service. Currently, an important issue in MUM is coverage control. In this paper, existing coverage control algorithms have been extended to incorporate a new sen...Show More
Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are attracting growing interest due to its wide range of applications. Collision avoidance algorithm is one of the crucial issue for UAVs to autonomously handle avoidance maneuver if it encounters obstacle in the airspace. This has motivated the development of several collision avoidance algorithm. Various approach in two-dimensional and three-dimensional ...Show More
In this paper, a multi-plane infrared visual odometry (VO) algorithm is proposed for the navigation system of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) flying at a medium height for both day and night. It uses a monocular downward-looking and stabilized thermal camera, aided by a single laser beam to restore scale factor. The scale recovery is further improved by a series of comprehensive logics of taking di...Show More
Optical flow is a useful signal for mobile agents, both biological and artificial. In this paper we present modification and implementation of a well known "plane-fitting" approach to event-based optical flow estimation for Dynamic Vision Sensors. The optical flow algorithm, as well as all required preprocessing steps are implemented in FPGA. The algorithm achieves sub microsecond latency and is f...Show More
A neural network-based distributed adaptive approach combined with sliding mode technique is proposed for vehicle-following platoons in the presence of input saturation, unknown unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, and external disturbances. A simple and straightforward strategy by adjusting only a single parameter is proposed to compensate for the effect of input saturation. Two spacing polices (i.e., t...Show More
This paper studies platooning problem of multiple VTOL unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in an unknown cluttered environment such as urban canyon, forest or indoor environment. Each UAV is equipped with a limited range sensor that is used to actively detect obstacles around it, and an on-board camera is equipped to estimate the relative position between UAVs. In this study, the platooning problem of...Show More
In recent years, multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems have been an active research area. Coverage problem is a basic task in multi unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). As UAVs are nowadays widely used in many application areas, the research in the coverage control has become a hot point. In this paper, we present a survey of the most works in this area, classifying the types of these works and ...Show More
In this paper, we explore the UAV loss detection and auto-replacement scheme in a multi UAV system. The developed scheme is based on the concept of cooperative multi UAV control, where the cooperation is achieved by broadcasting heartbeats (HBs) and information fusion technology. We first propose the UAV loss detection method by checking the HB time. Subsequently, we present the UAV auto-replaceme...Show More
This brief is concerned with integrated autonomous takeoff, target search, task assignment, and tracking using multiple fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments. The problem is to design flight autonomy that is embedded onboard each UAV to enable autonomous flight coordination and distributed tasking. Control logic design based on a finite state automaton model, integrating...Show More
This paper investigates the distributed adaptive control problems for nonlinear vehicle-following systems subject to nonlinear acceleration uncertainties involving vehicle acceleration disturbances, wind gusts, and parameter uncertainties. It is worth mentioning that the acceleration of the leader in most existing studies is always assumed to be zero or constant; the evolution of the leader in thi...Show More
In this brief, a novel distributed cascade robust feedback control approach is proposed for formation and reconfiguration control of a team of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). This approach is based on dynamic communication network. It guarantees intervehicle collision avoidance and considers dynamic constraints of UAVs. In the outer loop of the cascade formation c...Show More