Singularity-free Aerial Deformation by Two-dimensional Multilinked Aerial Robot with 1-DoF Vectorable Propeller
This work addresses a specific issue in aerial robotics for improved maneuvering and manipulation, but it is incremental, building on previous modeling and control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of singular forms in two-dimensional multilinked aerial robots by introducing a 1-DoF vectorable propeller to change thrust direction, and demonstrates feasibility through experiments with trajectory tracking in challenging forms like line-shapes.
Two-dimensional multilinked structures can benefit aerial robots in both maneuvering and manipulation because of their deformation ability. However, certain types of singular forms must be avoided during deformation. Hence, an additional 1 Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) vectorable propeller is employed in this work to overcome singular forms by properly changing the thrust direction. In this paper, we first extend modeling and control methods from our previous works for an under-actuated model whose thrust forces are not unidirectional. We then propose a planning method for the vectoring angles to solve the singularity by maximizing the controllability under arbitrary robot forms. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods by experiments where a quad-type model is used to perform trajectory tracking under challenging forms, such as a line-shape form, and the deformation passing these challenging forms.