An estimator of external generalized forces (force plus moments) acting on aerial platforms, and based on the momentum of the mechanical system, is proposed for the control of VToL UAVs together with a hierarchical architecture separating the translational and rotational dynamics of the vehicle. The closed-loop system equations are shaped as mechanical impedances, programmable through the controller gains, and forced by the residuals given by the estimation error. This arrangement allows the VToL UAVs to perform hovering and tracking tasks without a precise knowledge of the vehicle dynamics and in presence of external disturbances and unmodeled aerodynamic effects. Experiments are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed control design.
In this letter, a hybrid visual servoing with a hierarchical task-composition control framework is described for aerial manipulation, i.e., for the control of an aerial vehicle endowed with a robot arm. The proposed approach suitably combines into a unique hybrid-control framework the main benefits of both image-based and position-based control schemes. Moreover, the underactuation of the aerial vehicle has been explicitly taken into account in a general formulation, together with a dynamic smooth activation mechanism. Both simulation case studies and experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed techniqu
An architecture suitable for the control of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles deployed in Search & Rescue missions is presented in this paper. In the proposed system, a single colocated human operator is able to coordinate the actions of a set of robots in order to retrieve relevant information of the environment. This work is framed in the context of the SHERPA project whose goal is to develop a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in alpine scenario. Differently from typical human-drone interaction settings, here the operator is not fully dedicated to the drones, but involved in search and rescue tasks, hence only able to provide sparse and incomplete instructions to the robots. In this work, the domain, the interaction framework and the executive system for the autonomous action execution are discussed. The overall system has been tested in a real world mission with two drones equipped with on-board cameras
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