Experimental framework for a Ducted-Fan Miniature Aerial Vehicle

This paper focuses on the design and validation of a control framework for a Ducted-Fan Miniature Aerial Vehicle (MAV) realized by the University of Bologna in order to pursuit simple high level operations like surveillance, video capture, etc. After a description of the aircraft prototype and the nonlinear control law, two different control scenarios are then addressed, the first one characterized by a continuous interaction with the human operator (denoted as Remotely Operated Vehicle Mode), and the second one characterized by preloaded desired references to be followed (Trajectory Mode). Detailed experiments are finally presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed design techniques.