Ground Trajectory Control of an Unmanned Aerial-Ground Vehicle using Thrust Vectoring for Precise Grasping

Towards reconfigurable and flexible multirotors

“…Other requirements for a smart and compact RM design include: minimizing number of additional actuators, addressing sensor placement demands and ensuring minimal vibrations of the multiple moving parts. The number of external actuators and moving parts can be reduced by employing passive control surfaces such as angled motor mounts and deflectors (Drews et al 2014;Maia et al 2017;Mishra et al 2020). For multimodal RMs, design studies can focus on various propeller blade designs and their placement to cater to different densities (Yang et al 2015).…”

“…For example, in area surveillance tasks, an aerial-ground vehicle (AGV) can prevent collisions by crawling on the ground while flying over cluttered areas and ensuring safety (Mintchev and Floreano 2018). These multimodal RMs can also improve task efficiency in applications such as aerial grasping, where ground wash plays an adverse role during landing, and hence attempting the task in a ground modality will improve the grasping efficiency (Mishra et al 2020). Similarly, aerial-aquatic RMs can serve multiple purposes such as aiding aerial and underwater search-and-rescue missions, and monitoring coastal environments or off-shore aquatic lives (Yang et al 2015).…”

“…The most common form of achieving aerial to ground morphing is to modify the landing gear and accommodate either active or passive wheels for ground locomotion. This can be achieved by using thrust deflectors (Mishra et al 2020) or tiltrotors (Page and Pounds 2014;Jeong and Jung 2010) for propelling on land or employing an augmented wheel subsystem (Mulgaonkaret al 2016).…”