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  4. Assessment of the trajectory control performance on the Omnimorph, an omnidirectional morphing multirotor UAV

Assessment of the trajectory control performance on the Omnimorph, an omnidirectional morphing multirotor UAV

MSc assignment

Omnimorph is a novel multirotor UAV characterized by the possibility of switching between underactuated to fully actuated and omnidirectional flight modes by synchronous tilting of all its 8 propellers. This allows compromising between dexterity and energy efficiency. The omnimorph design and a novel control law have been proposed in [1]. Many open research questions are still open and this assignment focuses on answering the following.

  • Omnimorph design is, as explained in [1], inspired by the optimized design proposed in [2]. However, some design changes have been made to simplify the mechanical realization of Omnimorph. What is the effect of these changes in terms of feasible force and torque sets compared to the case in [2]?
  • In [1], a novel, optimization-based control law has been proposed for Omnimorph and tested in simulation successfully. However, the real prototype differs from the theoretical model, e.g., because complex mutual aerodynamic effects exist among the propellers, the centre of mass of the real platform is different than the theoretical one due to electronics and batteries, etc. How much does the behaviour of the controlled real platform differ from the simulated one in terms of position and attitude errors? To answer this question, the following steps will be addressed:
    1. Test the control on the real platform with fixedly tilted propellers in the omnidirectional configuration.
    2. Test the behaviour of the controller on the platform with fixed parallel propellers, and then test on the real platform if the simulated behaviour is satisfactory.
    3. Test the control on the real platform with actively tilting propellers.

References:

[1] Aboudorra, Y., Gabellieri, C., Brantjes, R., Sablé, Q., & Franchi, A. (2023). Modelling, Analysis and Control of OmniMorph: an Omnidirectional Morphing Multi-rotor UAV. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.16871.
[2] Brescianini, D., & D'Andrea, R. (2016, May). Design, modelling and control of an omnidirectional aerial vehicle. In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (pp. 3261-3266). IEEE.