Full-body Design and Control of an Aerial Manipulator

Aerial manipulation [1] is a promising field of robotics research. Aerial manipulators are aerial robots (e.g., quadcopters) equipped with tools (e.g., robotic arms) able to interact with the environment, thus enhancing the capabilities of the robot and widening the possible tasks which can be performed. These inherently unstable and complex systems come with challenging design and control problems.

Previous designs of aerial manipulators [2] did not allow to control each actuator at the force/torque level, thus leading to slow and inaccurate tasks. The proposed Master Thesis faces this issue by designing and implementing a full-body control which considers both the dynamics of the aerial robot and the manipulator and leverages state of the art techniques such as QP-based control and MPC [4]. In particular, a new torque-controlled arm is to be designed and implemented for the tilt-hex hexacopter platform [5] (available in the Rainbow Team), in order to obtain a thrust-torque  (optimal) control for the robot.

The designed control system will be tested in the drone arena of the Rainbow Team, and the experimental results will be compared to the results of previous works in the aerial manipulation literature.

List of 5 bibliographical references:

1. A. Ollero, M. Tognon, A. Suarez, D. J. Lee, and A. Franchi. “Past, present, and future of aerial robotic manipulators.” IEEE Trans. on Robotics, 2021.
2. G. Nava, Sablé, Q., Tognon, M., Pucci, D., and Franchi, A., “Direct Force Feedback Control and Online Multi-Task Optimization for Aerial Manipulators”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 331-338, 2020.
3. K. Bodie, Tognon, M., and Siegwart, R., “Dynamic End Effector Tracking with an Omnidirectional Parallel Aerial Manipulator”, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 8165-8172, 2021.
4. Martí-Saumell, Pep & Duarte, Hugo & Grosch, Patrick & Andrade Cetto, Juan & Santamaria, Angel & Solà, Joan. (2023). “Borinot: an open thrust-torque-controlled robot for research on agile aerial-contact motion”.
5. M. Ryll et al., "6D physical interaction with a fully actuated aerial robot," 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Singapore, 2017, pp. 5190-5195, doi: 10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989608.