Controller Design and Implementation of a New Quadrotor Manipulation System
This work addresses payload and flexibility limitations in aerial manipulation for robotics applications, representing an incremental improvement.
The paper tackles the problem of limited degrees of freedom and payload capacity in aerial manipulation systems by designing a quadrotor with a 2-DOF manipulator that enables 6-DOF trajectory tracking with minimal actuators, maximizing payload and mission time; feasibility is validated through numerical and experimental results.
The previously introduced aerial manipulation systems suffer from either limited end-effector DOF or small payload capacity. In this dissertation, a quadrotor with a 2-DOF manipulator is investigated that has a unique topology to enable the end-effector to track 6-DOF trajectory with the minimum possible number of actuators/links and hence, maximize the payload and/or mission time. The proposed system is designed, modeled, and constructed. An identification process is carried out to find the system parameters. An experimental setup is proposed with a 6-DOF state measurement and estimation scheme. The system feasibility is validated via numerical and experimental results. The inverse kinematics require a solution of complicated algebraic-differential equations. Therefore, an algorithm is developed to get an approximate solution of these equations.