FLOAT Drone: A Fully-actuated Coaxial Aerial Robot for Close-Proximity Operations
This work solves the challenge of reliable close-proximity operations for drones, which is incremental as it builds on existing fully-actuated UAVs by adding structural innovations.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling aerial robots to operate in close proximity by addressing dynamic coupling and airflow disturbances, resulting in a novel fully-actuated UAV with control surfaces and a coaxial design that suppresses lateral airflow and maintains compact size, validated through real-world experiments.
How to endow aerial robots with the ability to operate in close proximity remains an open problem. The core challenges lie in the propulsion system's dual-task requirement: generating manipulation forces while simultaneously counteracting gravity. These competing demands create dynamic coupling effects during physical interactions. Furthermore, rotor-induced airflow disturbances critically undermine operational reliability. Although fully-actuated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) alleviate dynamic coupling effects via six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) force-torque decoupling, existing implementations fail to address the aerodynamic interference between drones and environments. They also suffer from oversized designs, which compromise maneuverability and limit their applications in various operational scenarios. To address these limitations, we present FLOAT Drone (FuLly-actuated cOaxial Aerial roboT), a novel fully-actuated UAV featuring two key structural innovations. By integrating control surfaces into fully-actuated systems for the first time, we significantly suppress lateral airflow disturbances during operations. Furthermore, a coaxial dual-rotor configuration enables a compact size while maintaining high hovering efficiency. Through dynamic modeling, we have developed hierarchical position and attitude controllers that support both fully-actuated and underactuated modes. Experimental validation through comprehensive real-world experiments confirms the system's functional capabilities in close-proximity operations.