Design and analysis of hybrid systems, with applications to robotic aerial vehicles

Abstract

Decomposing complex, highly nonlinear systems into aggregates of simpler hybrid modes has proven to be a very successful way of designing and controlling autonomous vehicles. Examples include the use of motion primitives for robotic motion planning and equivalently the use of discrete maneuvers for aggressive aircraft trajectory planning. In all of these approaches, it is extremely important to verify that transitions between modes are safe. In this paper, we present the use of a Hamilton-Jacobi differential game formulation for finding continuous reachable sets as a method of generating provably safe transitions through a sequence of modes for a quadrotor performing a backflip maneuver. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.