Autonomous Cooperative Flight of Rigidly Attached Quadcopters

Abstract

Research within the area of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a continuously expanding field due to their wide and diverse range of applications such as inspection, monitoring, mapping, precision agriculture, aerial imaging and entertainment. However, their application in tasks such as transportation, tool manipulation or assistance in emergency situations still poses many challenges.In this thesis, a novel strategy for cooperative flight of physically attached quadcopters which allows the quadcopters to perform the transportation of heavier loads and carrying out more complex tasks is proposed. Specifically, a method for online and automatic modelling and control of the quadcopters without human intervention is introduced.First, the method performs the estimation of the physical structure attaching the quadcopter's solely relying on information from the quadcopters Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) obtained via simple and short online experiments. Then, given the estimated physical structure, a stable operation of the quadcopters is achieved via a distributed controller, where the controller parameters are obtained via reinforcement learning. Finally, experimental results validate the proposed method, showing that a correct estimation of the physical structure is obtained as well as a stable flight is achieved for a set of connected quadcopters.Primero me gustaria dar las gracias a mis padres, ellos son los que llevan dos años no solo haciendo un esfuerzo económico enorme, pero además decir adiós a un hijo siempre es duro. Lo se porque también ha sido duro decirles adios a ellos. Han sabido estar no estando, apoyarme, darme cualquier cosa que necesitase. Han sufrido conmigo a lo largo de estos dos años, y por supuesto, han celebrado mis pequeños logros. Gracias a ellos, por esas miradas de orgullo aún cuando no entendian absolutamente nada de lo que estaba haciendo. Gracias, porque fuisteis y seguís siendo el molde, la guía y la brújula y soy quien soy por vosotros.Cristina, gracias por haber seguido luchando cada dia sin ninguna duda. Has sido mi primer apoyo en todo momento. La primera persona con la que celebraba lo bueno y a la primera a la que le contaba lo malo. Eres una de las principales razones por las que estoy donde estoy. Durante todo este tiempo no has parado de mirarme orgullosa de mi, y me has dado fuerzas en los peores días en los que todo se veía muy negro. Gracias, gracias, gracias.Soma and José, thank you very much for placing your trust in me after that first Skype interview. You both were two amazing supervisors, you gave total freedom to implement my ideas and you have patience with all my "this is super easy" that turned to be several weeks of not that easy work. This Master Thesis can be readable only because you read and correct it over more than 7 iterations. Thank you for keep placing your trust in me now.Gracias a Roberto y Mario. Se que la distancia ha hecho mella, pero quiero agradeceros que sigais ahí. Agradeceros tanto las conversaciones serias como las más estúpidas de todas. La d...

Estimation and Control of Cooperative Aerial Manipulators for a Payload with an Arbitrary Center-of-Mass

“…However, the GPS sensor cannot be applied to GPS-denied environments. To resolve this issue, in [ 20 ], the relative position and orientation for rigidly-attached quadrotors were estimated without using an external force-torque sensor. However, this method only estimates kinematic parameters including the relative length and orientation of each quadrotor.…”