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During my PhD project performed at tne Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, I have been working on Aerial Physical Interaction (APhI) and Manipulation. The efforts of this work are published as a book here.
APhI implies a case, in which a flying (aerial) robot can exert meaningful forces and torques to its environment while performing a stable flight. I considered Aerial Manipulation as a subset of APhI, where the flying mechanism consists of not only a flying base, but also one or more manipulating arm(s).
Clearly controlling the flying robots for physical interaction, and in the air, is a challenging task. To overcome this challenge I have adopted the following steps:
- Dynamic modeling of the flying robots (particularly quadrotors and planar vtols)
- Dynamic system analysis (differential flatness properties, linearizability)
- Nonlinear control development (Interconnection and Damping Assignment - Passivity Based Control, Flatness-Based Control)
- Design and development of novel tools (elastic-joint arm, light-weight manipulators)
The videos of the resulting experiments of my work are partially presented here.
What are the fundamentals for aerial physical interaction of flying robots ?
What are the fundamentals for aerial physical interaction of flying robots ?
The physical interaction of flying machines, a.k.a. aerial physical interaction, means that a flying machine (or robot) can exert desired forces and torques to its environment while it can preserve its stable flight. Hence it is today in interest of many scientists, in sense of developing new control algorithms and designing novel interaction tools.
The goal of this research is was to make a quadrotor, a four propeller light-weight flying robot, physically interact with its environment, while it maintains a stable flight.
We tackle the existing problems to achieve the project goal in three different ways:
- Studying nonlinear system and control theory for aerial physical interaction: We are developing new control algorithms for aerial physical interaction. It is necessary to describe the problem/goal at hand in a meaningful way. For this reason, we first presented Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity Based Control (IDA-PBC) framework for quadrotors. The idea is to have a controller which shapes the physical properties of a quadrotor for achieving a desired interaction behaviour. In parallel, we analyse the aerial manipulators, consisting of an aerial vehicle and one or multiple manipulator arms, with rigid and/or compliant type of actuators. Our current tool to tackle this problem is differential flatness property of the system. We propose both flatness based and exact linearizing controllers for various type of aerial manipulators .
- Estimation theory: We develop estimation algorithms for interaction force and torques acting on a quadrotor robot. Since force and torque measurement is an expensive procedure in sense of power, money and weight; we introduced a nonlinear force observer for quadrotors.
- Design and manufacturing of novel tools and hardware/software development: We have designed a novel light-weight manipulator for aerial physical interaction, which can easily equipped with a small-sized aerial vehicles. More particularly, it is designed to be an elastic actuator, which is known to be providing passive compliance, which is very important for stable physical interaction. For this reason, we have developed a flexible-joint arm for flying robots such as quadrotors, to improve their aerial physical interaction capabilities. Furthermore, we are working on low-level control algorithms for brush-less controllers, flight controllers and small-size computers for not only making aerial physical interaction possible, but also achieving better flying performance.
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