Omnidirectional UAVs allow independent control of the robot's 6-DoFs workspace, constituting a general-purpose flying robotic platform for virtually any inspection task. To enable interaction tasks, a rigid link is attached to the Omni-Morph platform. This vehicle is built to optimize energy usage without limiting the set of achievable maneuvers by switching between these two operating modes based on task requirements: performance mode for tasks that do not require decoupled motions like point-to-point trajectory following, and full motion dexterity mode when precise positioning and orientation are needed. The this thesis tackles the challenge of designing and experimentally validate an interaction architecture for morphing MAVs.
The ultimate goal of this thesis is to obtain and demonstrate stable, reliable and autonomous physical interaction operation with the tilting Omni-Morph in real world experiments, with the performance remaining within satisfactory bounds. The controller will first be tested in simulation and then validated by deploying it on the UAV hardware and evaluating its performance through real-world experiments.
Expected outcomes:
- Designing an admittance interaction controller with a variable propellers’ tilting angle, tested first in various interaction scenarios carried in a simulation environment. This extends a similar existing scheme with the propellers being fixedly-tilted by solving an optimal and constrained control allocation problem involving the tilting angle as an unknown.
- Studying the performance of this controller in simulation against uncertainties in the allocation matrix.
- Validating the developed architecture by deploying it on the MAV hardware and evaluating its performance through real-world experiments. These tests include sliding contact (with the tool having fixed and variable orientations), sliding on surfaces with different slopes, and peg-in-hole tasks, all benchmarked against some quantitative metrics.
- Investigating how to best exploit the actuation redundancy to achieve some auxiliary goals during the operation.
- If time allows, conducting a feasibility study of passivity-based control scheme and assessing their performance relative to the developed baseline controller.
Skills and Competences: Strong programming skills in MATLAB/Simulink, preferably, prior experience with coding in C++/C., solid understanding of fundamentals in robot dynamics and control, and proficiency in using physics engines like Gazebo.