Energy-aware collaborative transportation and manipulation with multi-drone systems

With the recent developments of multi-robot systems, fleets of aerial robots are being used for collaborative load transportation and manipulation in application cases such as  post-disaster response tasks, harvesting in remote areas, or collaborative manipulation of over-sized materials on construction sites.

These complex tasks are carried out in highly unstructured, dynamic, and often unknown environments, which prevents us from implementing a specific controllers with fixed parameters and a fixed team the accomplishment of the mission. For instance, when the load is not constant/fixed (e.g. deformable objects, loading/unloading by human operators) a constant team of robots might prove insufficient since the load could increase beyond the current team’s capabilities. On the other hand, when sharing the workspace with other teams of robots or humans, it is necessary to guarantee the safety of the systems and persons as well as its compliance to human guidance and manipulation.

The goal of this Master Thesis is to exploit recent advancements on the topic of energy-aware coordination of  multi-drone systems to handle collaborative load transportation in unknown and unstructured environments with a team of drones. Extensions to the case of safe shared human-multi-robot transportation could also be considered. The work done during the the internship will be validated in simulation and, if the time allows, experimentally using the drones available in the team.

List of 5 bibliographical references:

1. F. Califano, R. Rashad, C. Secchi, S. Stramigioli. On the Use of Energy Tanks for Robotic Systems. In: Borja, P., Della Santina, C., Peternel, L., Torta, E. (eds) Human-Friendly Robotics 2022. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 26, pp. 174-188, 2022.
2. M. Xue, Y. Tang, W. Ren, F. Qian. Stability of multi-dimensional switched systems with an application to open multi-agent systems. Automatica, vol. 146, 110644, 2022.
3. D. Sanalitro, Tognon, M., Jimenez-Cano, A., Cortes, J., and Franchi, A., “Indirect Force Control of a Cable-suspended Aerial Multi-Robot Manipulator”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 2377-3766, 2022.
4. C. Gabellieri, Tognon, M., Sanalitro, D., and Franchi, A., “Equilibria, Stability, and Sensitivity for the Aerial Suspended Beam Robotic System Subject to Parameter Uncertainty”, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, pp. 1-17, 2023.
5. Sun, S., & Franchi, A. (2023). Nonlinear MPC for full-pose manipulation of a cable-suspended load using multiple UAVs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.08545.