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Krishna and Elena at ICRA 2024
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Krishna Murali and Elena Ponce were selected for their work by Professor Leandro Lustosa to take part in the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA ) held from May 13 to 17, 2024. They tell us about this unique experience, made possible thanks to the support of the Foundation.
Tell us how the project came about
We are Krishna Murali and Elena Ponce, two students in the Aerospace Engineering Master’s program. During our two years at ISAE SUPAERO, we worked with Professor Leandro Lustosa at IONLAB, a research and training program on guidance, navigation and control within ISAE-SUPAERO’s Department of Aerospace Vehicle Design and Control (DCAS). IONLAB is part of the Decision and Control research group, where we develop methodologies for solving complex control problems by combining subsystems through an interdisciplinary lens.
The work carried out at IONLAB was part of the Master’s program research project. The project concerned the MAVION, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) and tail unit. . Sa plateforme hybride combine les capacités d’un avion à voilure fixe, qui permet une vitesse élevée et une longue endurance, avec celles d’un avion à voilure tournante, qui offre des capacités de vol stationnaire et de décollage et d’atterrissage courts. Cela leur permet d’effectuer des missions qui nécessitent un déplacement à longue distance combiné à un vol stationnaire, telles que la surveillance, l’inspection structurelle, la cartographie, etc.
The philosophy we reason with most, which is also reflected in our work at IONLAB, is that drones are the future. Drone technology sits perfectly at the crossroads of aerospace and robotics – their use cases prevent them from being developed like traditional aircraft, which is why they often borrow fundamental concepts from robotics.
The International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) was therefore the ideal conference to get in touch with this field.
How did the conference go?
Elena Ponce & Krishna Murali
At ICRA, we were able to present a paper in which we validated through flight tests an aerodynamic framework called phi theory, developed at ISAE-SUPAERO. This is a framework designed for tailplanes like the MAVION, which encounter conditions in which certain aerodynamic angles, essential in the modeling of traditional Buckingham-pi theory (the aerodynamic framework used in traditional aircraft), become indefinite or singular. The phi theory makes it possible to calculate a globally adjusted (i.e. equilibrium) flight envelope for the MAVION. The key feature of our paper is that we are able to use phi theory to illustrate a typical predicted longitudinal and lateral flight envelope (called the doghouse plot) of a tail-sitter, which, although common for aircraft in performance manuals, is a new figure that generalizes aircraft doghouse plots to tail-sitting vehicles. Phi theory also produces polynomial-type equations of motion, which are well suited to controllers based on sum-of-squares optimization. The ultimate aim of the MAVION project is to implement and test this type of controller in flight, which is what we’ve been working on throughout our research project.
Throughout our study at IONLAB, we were interested in the work of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which used phi theory to control its own tailsitter and succeeded in following an agile trajectory in flight, something we are also trying to do at ISAE-SUPAERO. Meeting them at ICRA was one of the highlights of our experience, as we talked a lot and even took away some specific points to pursue our research. Meeting the rest of the community who also work with drones, seeing the research currently being carried out in this field and observing all the aerospace questions being answered from a robotics perspective has been a real source of inspiration. While the conference itself had around 7,000 attendees, we were able to interact with dozens of people working at leading institutions and companies in the field of robotics and aerospace (e.g. Technical University of Delft, Boston Dynamics, Toyota Research Institute, Mathworks, European Space Agency, etc.).
What do you retain from this experience?
As students looking to move into research, it was an incredible experience to see what our potential future in this field could look like. The dynamism and passion of the researchers is contagious. We feel lucky to be part of a community filled with people who truly believe in the positive impact their research can have. It was also exciting to see researchers and even students like us bringing their live demonstrations of the robots and drones they’ve built.
As authors, it was also a very enriching experience. One of our strengths was our oral presentation skills, as throughout the past year at IONLAB, we had been giving bi-weekly presentations, which made the final presentation much less intimidating. There were around 30 people in the room, including people from other leading institutions (such as the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), MIT and Imperial College London (ICL)) who were very interested in our presentation. We were asked interesting questions and told about our work and phi theory. Although we think there’s always room for improvement, overall we’re very pleased with the way things went.
Any final words?
Of course, none of this would have been possible without the help of the ISAE-SUPAERO Foundation. Thanks in particular to the Foundation, we were able to attend the conference together and present our work as co-authors. This experience enabled us to share ISAE-SUPAERO’s research with the robotics community, helping to bridge the gap between the two fields so that knowledge can flow more freely between them. It also allowed us, as students, to immerse ourselves in the academic world and gave us the opportunity to explore our career options as our time as Masters students draws to a close.
This conference was an experience none of us will forget. We are incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to represent ISAE-SUPAERO at ICRA 2024, and we couldn’t have imagined a more beautiful way to end our journey here.