Aerial Manipulation using Model Predictive Control for Opening a Hinged Door
This work addresses the challenge of aerial robots interacting with dynamic environments, which is incremental as it extends existing methods from static to moving structures.
The paper tackled the problem of an aerial manipulator interacting with a moving structure, specifically opening a hinged door, by applying model predictive control to handle constraints and avoid collisions, with experimental validation showing real-time operation.
Existing studies for environment interaction with an aerial robot have been focused on interaction with static surroundings. However, to fully explore the concept of an aerial manipulation, interaction with moving structures should also be considered. In this paper, a multirotor-based aerial manipulator opening a daily-life moving structure, a hinged door, is presented. In order to address the constrained motion of the structure and to avoid collisions during operation, model predictive control (MPC) is applied to the derived coupled system dynamics between the aerial manipulator and the door involving state constraints. By implementing a constrained version of differential dynamic programming (DDP), MPC can generate position setpoints to the disturbance observer (DOB)-based robust controller in real-time, which is validated by our experimental results.