A Simple Six Degree-of-Freedom Aerial Vehicle Built on Quadcopters

Pi, Chen-Huan; Ruan, Lecheng; Yu, Pengkang; Su, Yao; Cheng, Stone; Tsao, Tsu‐Chin

doi:10.1109/ccta48906.2021.9658811

Cited by 16 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…T is denoted as the thrust force of the ith arm, expressed in  f , Δ𝛼 i as the tilt angle from k F f i to the −z f direction. Then we can express the control effective model (16) in  f as…”

Section: Cgi Adopted Fdmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The tilt angle command gradually increases from 0.5 s and completely reaches the FW mode at 3 s. The sinusoidal command signals for roll and pitch torque are given during the whole simulation. We compare the basic FD-based method (B-FD) from [9,16,17], which is suitable and widely used for tilt-rotor UAV. For the actuator constraints, we adopt (CGI) into the FD-based method using a coordinate transformation and priority setting, the CGI method we use is originated from [21].…”

Section: Simulation 1: Manoeuvring In Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Additionally, the input constraints, especially the tilt angles limits, were not considered in this method. The force decomposition (FD)-based allocation method is a fast and effective approach for transforming the non-linear allocation problem into a linear one [16]. Yao et al developed an FD-based method with compensation for additional disturbance using input redundancies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A smooth control allocation method for a distributed electric propulsion VTOL aircraft test platform

Qin¹,

Liu²,

Zhao³

2023

IET Control Theory & Appl

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Distributed electronic propulsion (DEP) aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) ability mostly equipped with multiple redundant tiltable propulsors, which are used to provide not only thrusts, but also control torque in all flight mode. The features make the control allocation problem of these aircraft both complex and important. Therefore, this paper proposes: (і) a prototype platform for DEP VTOL aircraft that allows researchers to design and analyse control allocation strategies, and (іі) a uniform hierarchical control allocation method that can be adapted to both MC and FW modes. The platform contains ten fully actuated thrusters, which are distributed in the scaled geometry of a typical DEP-VTOL aircraft. The proposed control allocation strategy uses hierarchical structure to avoid high-dimensional matrix operations for the redundant actuators. The additional constraints on the thrust and tilt angles of the actuators are addressed by adopting cascade generalized inversion (CGI) to force decompensation (FD)-based methods by a coordinate transformation. A novel smooth strategy through Schur Complement is also presented to achieve steady and smooth transition from MC to FW mode. Finally, the proposed method is implemented in the authors' novel platform in both simulations and flight experiments to demonstrate its effectiveness and smoothness.

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Section: Cgi Adopted Fdmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Simulation 1: Manoeuvring In Transitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A smooth control allocation method for a distributed electric propulsion VTOL aircraft test platform

Qin¹,

Liu²,

Zhao³

2023

IET Control Theory & Appl

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“…As a new type of over-actuated UAV platforms that use quadcopters and passive joints to achieve full actuation [5,6,8], they inherently have more propellers than standard tiltrotor platforms and thus the likelihood of propeller failure is increased. In this paper, we present an FTC for this type of UAV platform to sufficiently use the redundancy of the entire platform in both high-level and low-level control, thus improving the robustness of the platform against propeller failure.…”

Section: B Fault-tolerant Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first group of works [2][3][4] adopt multiple propeller-motor pairs in various or varying directions to achieve full or over actuation. The second group of works [5][6][7][8][9] make use of regular quadcopter as mounted on passive hinges as actuation modules to simplify the design and prototyping process and reduce the internal disturbance level [9]. With more actuators onboard, these platforms must exhibit better robustness towards propeller failure compared to conventional quadcopters: without sufficient FTC algorithms, over-actuated multirotor systems Yao Su, Pengkang Yu, Matthew J. Gerber, Lecheng Ruan, and Tsu-Chin Tsao are with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA (e-mail: yaosu@ucla.edu; paulyu1994@ucla.edu; gerber211@ucla.edu; ruanlecheng@ucla.edu; ttsao@ucla.edu).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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Propeller failure is one major reason for the falling and crashing of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While conventional multirotors can barely handle this issue due to underactuation, over-actuated platforms can still pursue the flight with proper fault-tolerant control (FTC). This paper investigates such a controller for one such over-actuated multirotor aerial platform composing quadcopters mounted on passive joints with input redundancy in both the high-level vehicle control and the low-level quadcopter control of vectored thrusts. To fully utilize the input redundancies of the whole platform under propeller failure, our proposed FTC controller has a hierarchical control architecture with three main components: (i) a low-level adjustment strategy to avoid propeller-level thrust saturation; (ii) a compensation loop to attenuate introduced disturbance; (iii) a nullspace-based control allocation framework to avoid quadcopter-level thrust saturation. Through reallocating actuator inputs in both the low-level and high-level control loops, the low-level quadcopter control can be maintained with at most two failed propellers and the whole platform can be stabilized without crashing. The proposed controller is extensively studied in both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate its superior performance.

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