Autonomous Navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Subjected to Time Delays

This thesis presents a new method of compensating for time delays in the control and navigation of UAVs. The aerial vehicles are controlled with a coordinated lateral control. The operator signals are delayed and a bank of recursive least squares (RLS) filters are used to identify the delay and the target waypoint. Hypothesis testing is implemented to select the filter that most closely matches the delay. This filter determines the delay and the target waypoint.Once a filter is selected, the UAV then computes its heading to the estimated target waypoint. By executing the self computed heading, the UAV performs autonomous navigation to the target waypoint. The operator keeps operating the UAV and the UAV keeps track of the operator commands so that if there is a change in delay or the waypoint, the UAV learns and adjusts accordingly.