Quadrotor Manipulation System: Development of a Robust Contact Force Estimation and Impedance Control Scheme Based on DOb and FTRLS
This work addresses control and manipulation issues for aerial robots, which is incremental as it builds on existing DOb and FTRLS methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the challenge of robust force estimation and impedance control for quadrotor manipulation systems, which are unstable and susceptible to disturbances, by proposing a scheme based on Disturbance Observer (DOb) and Fast Tracking Recursive Least Squares (FTRLS) algorithm, with numerical simulations demonstrating its efficiency in tracking and control tasks.
The research on aerial manipulation systems has been increased rapidly in recent years. These systems are very attractive for a wide range of applications due to their unique features. However, dynamics, control and manipulation tasks of such systems are quite challenging because they are naturally unstable, have very fast dynamics, have strong nonlinearities, are very susceptible to parameters variations due to carrying a payload besides the external disturbances, and have complex inverse kinematics. In addition, the manipulation tasks require estimating (applying) a certain force of (at) the end-effector as well as the accurate positioning of it. Thus, in this article, a robust force estimation and impedance control scheme is proposed to address these issues. The robustness is achieved based on the Disturbance Observer (DOb) technique. Then, a tracking and performance low computational linear controller is used. For teleoperation purpose, the contact force needs to be identified. However, the current developed techniques for force estimation have limitations because they are based on ignoring some dynamics and/or requiring of an indicator of the environment contact. Unlike these techniques, we propose a technique based on linearization capabilities of DOb and a Fast Tracking Recursive Least Squares (FTRLS) algorithm. The complex inverse kinematics problem of such a system is solved by a Jacobin based algorithm. The stability analysis of the proposed scheme is presented. The algorithm is tested to achieve tracking of task space reference trajectories besides the impedance control. The efficiency of the proposed technique is enlightened via numerical simulation.