One branch of aerial physical interaction involves the application of wrenches to the external environment using an aerial manipulator. This requires suitable hardware and interaction control algorithms. Recent developments in the design of multirotor aerial vehicles led to omnidirectional vehicles, like the one designed and developed in [1,2].
Objective 1 focuses on improving the control of the aforementioned platform. The bi-directional propellers used allow for inverting the thrust by inverting the direction of spinning of the propellers. There are, however, dead zones around a spinning velocity equal to zero in which the controlled propellers do not work. This thesis focuses on the implementation of an input allocation strategy for the aforementioned robot that accounts for the presence of these input constraints by generating feasible control inputs. The new strategy will be tested in free-flight and in physical interaction experiments and compared against the baseline.
The first research question is: Does the new allocation strategy improve the performance of the controlled omnidirectional octa-rotor? If yes, in terms of which metric and in which conditions?
Objective 2 focuses on improving the design. The design of multirotor aerial vehicles like the one in [1] is optimized considering the center of mass of the robot at its geometric center. This optimal design does not consider the presence of an end-effector to perform physical interaction tasks. This thesis will optimize the design of the omnidirectional octa-rotor where the center of gravity is shifted and the orientations of the propellers are optimization variables.
The related research question is: What is the optimal propeller orientation for the omnidirectional octa-rotor mentioned above when a rigid end-effector is attached to the robot? How does it differ from the standard design?
References:
[1]Brescianini, Dario, and Raffaello D'Andrea. "Design, modeling and control of an omni-directional aerial vehicle." 2016 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2016.
[2]Aboudorra, Y., Gabellieri, C., Brantjes, R., Sablé, Q., & Franchi, A. (2024). Modelling, analysis, and control of omnimorph: an omnidirectional morphing multi-rotor uav. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 110(1), 21.