An Over-Actuated Multi-Rotor Aerial Vehicle With Unconstrained Attitude Angles and High Thrust Efficiencies

Yu, Pengkang; Su, Yao; Gerber, Matthew J.; Ruan, Lecheng; Tsao, Tsu‐Chin

doi:10.1109/lra.2021.3095035

Cited by 23 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…As a new type of over-actuated UAV platforms that use quadcopters and passive joints to achieve full actuation [5,6,8], they inherently have more propellers than standard tiltrotor platforms and thus the likelihood of propeller failure is increased. In this paper, we present an FTC for this type of UAV platform to sufficiently use the redundancy of the entire platform in both high-level and low-level control, thus improving the robustness of the platform against propeller failure.…”

Section: B Fault-tolerant Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In our previous work [10], a nullspacebased allocation framework was created to combine the benefits of FD-based and QP-based frameworks and provide exact allocation solutions that satisfied the defined input constraints in real-time. Specifically, we demonstrated its ability by solving the kinematic-singularity problem of a twist-andtilt rotor platform [6]. In this paper, we further implement this framework to address the issue of thrust force saturation and propeller failure on a different over-actuated UAV platform.…”

Section: A Control Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this paper, we present an FTC for this type of UAV platform to sufficiently use the redundancy of the entire platform in both high-level and low-level control, thus improving the robustness of the platform against propeller failure. As a result, various UAV platforms [6,13,29,30,36,37] that may have different thrust generation capabilities among propellers/thrust-generation modules under propeller failure can have better rotor-failure robustness.…”

Section: B Fault-tolerant Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first group of works [2][3][4] adopt multiple propeller-motor pairs in various or varying directions to achieve full or over actuation. The second group of works [5][6][7][8][9] make use of regular quadcopter as mounted on passive hinges as actuation modules to simplify the design and prototyping process and reduce the internal disturbance level [9]. With more actuators onboard, these platforms must exhibit better robustness towards propeller failure compared to conventional quadcopters: without sufficient FTC algorithms, over-actuated multirotor systems Yao Su, Pengkang Yu, Matthew J. Gerber, Lecheng Ruan, and Tsu-Chin Tsao are with Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA (e-mail: yaosu@ucla.edu; paulyu1994@ucla.edu; gerber211@ucla.edu; ruanlecheng@ucla.edu; ttsao@ucla.edu).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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Propeller failure is one major reason for the falling and crashing of multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While conventional multirotors can barely handle this issue due to underactuation, over-actuated platforms can still pursue the flight with proper fault-tolerant control (FTC). This paper investigates such a controller for one such over-actuated multirotor aerial platform composing quadcopters mounted on passive joints with input redundancy in both the high-level vehicle control and the low-level quadcopter control of vectored thrusts. To fully utilize the input redundancies of the whole platform under propeller failure, our proposed FTC controller has a hierarchical control architecture with three main components: (i) a low-level adjustment strategy to avoid propeller-level thrust saturation; (ii) a compensation loop to attenuate introduced disturbance; (iii) a nullspace-based control allocation framework to avoid quadcopter-level thrust saturation. Through reallocating actuator inputs in both the low-level and high-level control loops, the low-level quadcopter control can be maintained with at most two failed propellers and the whole platform can be stabilized without crashing. The proposed controller is extensively studied in both simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate its superior performance.

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Section: B Fault-tolerant Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Control Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: B Fault-tolerant Controlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Nullspace-Based Control Allocation of Overactuated UAV Platforms

Gerber

et al. 2021

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

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“…Another possibility is to combine under-actuated multi-rotors into a new fully actuated structure. Pi et al [15] passively hinges four standard quadrotors to a six DOF platform, based on which Yu et al [16] place each quadrotor in a gimbal with two passive joints, for an over-actuated platform. Nguyen et al [17] also make use of standard quadrotors as thrust generators and passively connects them to a base with spherical joints, which is able to add more controllable DOF to the overall system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control for Attitude and Altitude Synchronization of Quadrotors Based on Fully-Actuated System Approaches

Li,

Zhang,

Miao

et al. 2023

2023 2nd Conference on Fully Actuated System Theory and Applications (CFASTA)

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The standard quadrotor is one of the most popular and widely used aerial vehicle of recent decades, offering great maneuverability with mechanical simplicity. However, the under-actuation characteristic limits its applications, especially when it comes to generating desired wrench with six degrees of freedom (DOF). Therefore, existing work often compromises between mechanical complexity and the controllable DOF of the aerial system. To take advantage of the mechanical simplicity of a standard quadrotor, we propose a modular aerial system, IdentiQuad, that combines only homogeneous quadrotor-based modules. Each IdentiQuad can be operated alone like a standard quadrotor, but at the same time allows task-specific assembly, increasing the controllable DOF of the system. Each module is interchangeable within its assembly. We also propose a general controller for different configurations of assemblies, capable of tolerating rotor failures and balancing the energy consumption of each module. The functionality and robustness of the system and its controller are validated using physics-based simulations for different assembly configurations.

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