Control and experiments of a novel tiltable-rotor aerial platform comprising quadcopters and passive hinges

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

doi:10.1016/j.mechatronics.2022.102927

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The overall controller has a hierarchical structure: (i) a highlevel controller that provides the desired wrench commands for the platform to track a reference trajectory, and maps the wrench commands to the inputs of each thrust generator through control allocation (ii) a low-level controller on each quadcopter to track the desired joint angle and thrust with fast response. The stability of this controller has been proved in our previous work, please refer to [9] for more details.…”

Section: A Hierarchical Architecture and Tracking Controlmentioning

confidence: 87%

“…The over-actuated multirotor platform discussed in this paper adopts commercial quadcopters with passive hinges, serving as two-Degree-of-freedom (DoF) tiltable thrust generators [8,9]. As shown in Fig.…”

Section: Platform Dynamics and Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The proposed As introduced in [9], this type of over-actuated UAV platform has unlimited joint angle ranges and greatly reduces the mechanical complexity, compared to existing tiltable-rotor configurations [2,12,30,38,39] where the tilting of each rotor is actuated by a servo motor. Besides, our proposed configuration can eliminate the propeller drags, gyroscopic momentums and tilting reaction torques, which had been treated as disturbances or unmodeled dynamics in other tiltable-rotor platforms, because of the paired propellers rotating in opposite directions and the zero-torque transmission in the passive hinges.…”

Section: Platform Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Specifically, it could generate a desired thrust greater than motor saturation, leading to the instability of the platform. This is known as the thrust force saturation issue, which was investigated previously in [9], where the nominal FDbased allocation framework was shown to be insufficient to use the full thrust capability of the platform and an analytical solution was provided for a one-dimensional rotation scenario by formulating it as a min-max optimization problem. Here, we generalize this problem in a standard trajectory-tracking scenario.…”

Section: B Nominal Allocation Frameworkmentioning

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%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: A Hierarchical Architecture and Tracking Controlmentioning

confidence: 87%

Section: Platform Dynamics and Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Platform Propertymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Nominal Allocation Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Vehicle vibration test platform structure design and control strategy optimization

Xi,

Guo,

Wang

et al. 2024

Adv Control Appl

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

For the needs of vehicle vibration test platform with high precision, large load capacity and fast response, the three‐dimensional model design and analysis of vehicle vibration test platform are carried out; in order to improve the motion performance of the platform, a vibration test plat‐form control strategy combining hybrid heuristic algorithm and PID control is proposed. Based on the designed 3D model parameters, the single‐channel mathematical model of the servo‐electric cylinder is derived and a hybrid heuristic algorithm PID optimization model is established to compare and analyze the control performance of the platform with the Ziegler‐Nichols method PID. The results show that the step system overshoot is 3.80% and the dynamic performance of the system is significantly improved when the hybrid heuristic algorithm PID control is used. The simulation system model of vehicle vibration test platform control is established, and the operation results show that the platform is closer to the input signal in the spatial position change curve when the hybrid heuristic algorithm PID control is used. Its maximum displacement error is 0.09 mm, and the motion accuracy of the system is improved by 61% compared with the Ziegler‐Nichols method PID control.

show abstract