Toward Impact-resilient Quadrotor Design, Collision Characterization and Recovery Control to Sustain Flight after Collisions
This work addresses collision resilience for aerial robots, which is crucial for applications in cluttered or dynamic environments, representing a domain-specific advancement.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling quadrotors to sustain flight after collisions by introducing a compliant arm design for shock absorption, a Hall sensor-based detection method, and a recovery control algorithm. Experimental results show the robot can detect and recover from high-speed collisions with various obstacles, including unstructured surfaces and moving objects.
Collision detection and recovery for aerial robots remain a challenge because of the limited space for sensors and local stability of the flight controller. We introduce a novel collision-resilient quadrotor that features a compliant arm design to enable free flight while allowing for one passive degree of freedom to absorb shocks. We further propose a novel collision detection and characterization method based on Hall sensors, as well as a new recovery control method to generate and track a smooth trajectory after a collision occurs. Experimental results demonstrate that the robot can detect and recover from high-speed collisions with various obstacles such as walls and poles. Moreover, it can survive collisions that are hard to detect with existing methods based on IMU data and contact models, for example, when colliding with unstructured surfaces, or being hit by a moving obstacle while hovering.