The UAV's physical interaction with the external environment can be seen in many applications such as bridge contact-based inspection, pruning a tree branch, powerline testing, pipe inspections, etc. Performing physical interactions with an unstructured environment demands integrating a UAV, the attached arm, and the controller system. Meanwhile, Fully-actuated UAVs have decoupled translational and rotational motion, extending the operating capabilities and making this category well-suited for aerial physical contact.
The critical challenge in UAVs' physical interaction task is the external forces coming from the arm toward the UAV, which can adversely affect its stability. So far, researchers have tried to reject those disturbances with the help of control methods such as admittance control, where the UAV follows external forces by calculating the desired position or velocity using the equation of motion of a virtual object. Admittance control requires measuring/ estimating the external forces and moments being exerted on the craft.
This project aims to incorporate a suitable force sensor into an arm attached to a fully actuated UAV, which can feed back the force data to the controller to increase stability and accuracy while making contact. To achieve this, the flight controller has to be modified to accept the force as a state variable and provide real-time feedback.
Undergraduate
None
Motion Capture Lab (405.836E, Lab)