Using aerial robots for interacting with the environment is an active field of research. It lies in the overlap between UAV and interaction control research. Currently a method is proposed for achieving a controlled interaction wrench between a fully-actuated UAV and a surface. This method makes use of a wrench controller in combination with a wrench observer, such that closed loop control can be achieved.
However, the wrench observer outputs a signal that consists of: aerodynamic disturbance, modelling errors and an interaction wrench. A solution proposed is using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to split the output signal of the wrench observer into: the interaction wrench between the UAV and the surface, and a disturbance wrench. Now the interaction wrench can be used for the wrench control feedback loop, and the disturbance wrench can be used for feedforward disturbance attunuation.
It is the task of this individual project to further improve and validate the proposed method.