Design of a Fully Actuated Drone with Non-Isotropic Wrench Shape

Conventional fully actuated drones face challenges related to high energy consumption during aerial contact manipulation, particularly when force exertion along a specific direction is required. This challenge arises from the balanced tilting of propellers, leading to an isotropic wrench shape. 

To address this limitation, we explicitly define the required wrench set (RW) for aerial contact manipulation and integrate it into an optimization problem. To ensure the required wrench generation, we employ the hyperplane shifting method, commonly used for verifying wrench feasibility in cable-driven robots. The optimization aims to minimize hovering energy consumption while ensuring wrench feasibility. 

Consequently, the proposed design demonstrates a significant improvement over the typical fully actuated drone, with hovering and contact force efficiency more than doubled and nearly 1.4 times higher, respectively. The effectiveness of our design is also validated through simulation.

Contact: Seongsu Park (seongsu.park@kaist.ac.kr)

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Related Publications

S. Park, and M. J. Kim, "Design of a Fully Actuated Drone with Non-Isotropic Wrench Shape", IEEE/RSJ IROS 2024 (accepted)

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