Design and optimal control of a tiltrotor micro-aerial vehicle for efficient omnidirectional flight

Abstract

Omnidirectional micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) are a growing field of research, with demonstrated advantages for aerial interaction and uninhibited observation. While systems with complete pose omnidirectionality and high hover efficiency have been developed independently, a robust system that combines the two has not been demonstrated to date. This paper presents the design and optimal control of a novel omnidirectional vehicle that can exert a wrench in any orientation while maintaining efficient flight configurations. The system design is motivated by the result of a morphology design optimization. A six-degree-of-freedom optimal controller is derived, with an actuator allocation approach that implements task prioritization, and is robust to singularities. Flight experiments demonstrate and verify the system’s capabilities.

Design of multirotor aerial vehicles: A taxonomy based on input allocation

“…Finally, Allenspach et al (2020) presented a dodecacopter that is an upgrade of the Voliro design presented in Kamel et al (2018), where the platform is endowed with 12 propellers, mounted on 6 equally spaced arms in pairs, where each of these pairs share the same spinning axis and rotate in opposing directions. Each arm of the platform can rotate about its radial axis, and thus n u = 12 + 6.…”

Dynamic End Effector Tracking With an Omnidirectional Parallel Aerial Manipulator

“…If the servomotors of the arm are controlled in position, they internally run a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller to track a desired position reference q D , considered as input. Given the current base pose, W p B and W R B , and desired end effector position W p d E , we can compute the joint references by inverting the kinematic relation 3 (3):…”

Development of Add-On Planar Translational Driving System for Aerial Manipulation with Multirotor Platform

“…To perform the position and attitude control of multirotor independently, which is impossible with a typical multirotor, several studies on novel platform development are reported in [11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. An omnidirectional aerial vehicle with unidirectional thrusters fixed to its airframe is proposed in [11,12].…”

“…The control algorithm was designed by [11] and the aerial robot was developed to perform the translation and attitude control on SE(3) separately [12]. Another approach for realizing positing and attitude independently is by tilting the rotors of a multirotor [13,14]. In [13], a quad tilt rotor UAV is developed and successfully showed hovering of the quad rotor with a 90 deg pitch angle.…”

“…In [13], a quad tilt rotor UAV is developed and successfully showed hovering of the quad rotor with a 90 deg pitch angle. In [14], the design and optimal control of a novel omnidirectional vehicle that can exert a wrench in any orientation while maintaining efficient flight configurations is presented. In [15,17], a novel multi-linked type of multirotor is developed and performed a manipulation task [16].…”