Lunni, Dario (Politecnico di Milano), Santamaria-Navarro, Angel (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC)), Rossi, Roberto (Politecnico di Milano), Rocco, Paolo (Politecnico di Milano), Bascetta, Luca (Politecnico di Milano), Andrade-Cetto, Juan (Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC)

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Aerial Manipulation

Scheduled for presentation during the "Control Architecture - I" (WeA3), Wednesday, June 14, 2017, 10:00−10:20, Salon CD

2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, June 13-16, 2017, Miami Marriott Biscayne Bay, Miami, FL,

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on May 8, 2024

Abstract

This paper presents a nonlinear model predictive controller to follow desired 3D trajectories with the end effector of an unmanned aerial manipulator (i.e., a multirotor with a serial arm attached). To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first time that such controller runs online and on board a limited computational unit to drive a kinematically augmented aerial vehicle. Besides the trajectory following target, we explore the possibility of accomplishing other tasks during flight by taking advantage of the system redundancy. We define several tasks designed for aerial manipulators and show in simulation case studies how they can be achieved by either a weighting strategy, within a main optimization process, or a hierarchical approach consisting on nested optimizations. Moreover, experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of such controller in a real robot.