Soliro -- a hybrid dynamic tilt-wing aerial manipulator with minimal actuators (2312.05110v1)
Abstract: The ability to enter in contact with and manipulate physical objects with a flying robot enables many novel applications, such as contact inspection, painting, drilling, and sample collection. Generally, these aerial robots need more degrees of freedom than a standard quadrotor. While there is active research of over-actuated, omnidirectional MAVs and aerial manipulators as well as VTOL and hybrid platforms, the two concepts have not been combined. We address the problem of conceptualization, characterization, control, and testing of a 5DOF rotary-/fixed-wing hybrid, tilt-rotor, split tilt-wing, nearly omnidirectional aerial robot. We present an elegant solution with a minimal set of actuators and that does not need any classical control surfaces or flaps. The concept is validated in a wind tunnel study and in multiple flights with forward and backward transitions. Fixed-wing flight speeds up to 10 m/s were reached, with a power reduction of 30% as compared to rotary wing flight.
- A. M. Kamal and A. Ramirez-Serrano, “Design methodology for hybrid (vtol+ fixed wing) unmanned aerial vehicles,” Aeronautics and Aerospace Open Access Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 165–176, 2018.
- D. Rohr, M. Studiger, T. Stastny, N. R. J. Lawrance, and R. Siegwart, “Nonlinear model predictive velocity control of a vtol tiltwing uav,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 5776–5783, 2021.
- A. Lindqvist, E. Fresk, and G. Nikolakopoulos, “Optimal design and modeling of a tilt wing aircraft,” in 2015 23rd Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), pp. 701–708, 2015.
- K. Bodie, M. Brunner, M. Pantic, S. Walser, P. Pfändler, U. Angst, R. Siegwart, and J. Nieto, “Active interaction force control for contact-based inspection with a fully actuated aerial vehicle,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 709–722, 2021.
- P. Zheng, X. Tan, B. B. Kocer, E. Yang, and M. Kovac, “Tiltdrone: A fully-actuated tilting quadrotor platform,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 6845–6852, 2020.
- S. Park, J. Lee, J. Ahn, M. Kim, J. Her, G.-H. Yang, and D. Lee, “Odar: Aerial manipulation platform enabling omnidirectional wrench generation,” IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, vol. 23, no. 4, pp. 1907–1918, 2018.
- D. Brescianini and R. D’Andrea, “An omni-directional multirotor vehicle,” Mechatronics, vol. 55, pp. 76–93, 2018.
- R. Watson, M. Kamel, D. Zhang, G. Dobie, C. MacLeod, S. G. Pierce, and J. Nieto, “Dry coupled ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation using an over-actuated unmanned aerial vehicle,” IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 2874–2889, 2022.
- E. N. Jacobs and A. Sherman, “Airfoil section characteristics as affected by variations of the reynolds number,” NACA Technical Report, vol. 586, no. 1, pp. 227–267, 1937.
- D. Rohr, T. Stastny, S. Verling, and R. Siegwart, “Attitude and cruise control of a vtol tiltwing uav,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 2683–2690, 2019.
- D. Brescianini, M. Hehn, and R. D’Andrea, “Nonlinear quadrocopter attitude control: Technical report,” tech. rep., ETH Zurich, 2013.
- PX4, PX4 Autopilot. Available at https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot.git.
- K. Bruce, J. Kelly, and L. PERSON, JR, “Nasa b737 flight test results of the total energy control system,” in Astrodynamics Conference, p. 2143, 1986.