Control of Vertical Take-off and Landing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, also Equipped with Small-scale Robot Manipulators

Dynamic equations of aerial robots are complicated due to both the high instability of the platform and the presence of aerodynamic effects, which are not easy to model. Robustness is still a major problem in UAV control. Attaching a small-scale robot manipulator to such an aerial system makes it straightforward to recognize that the dynamic coupling between the modelling terms becomes even more relevant. Representing the dynamic model of the whole system properly is crucial to developing suitable control laws. However, since most robotic arms placed on the UAVs are often small-size manipulators made up of servomotors, it is often impossible to directly control the joint torques. Hence, Fabio Ruggiero developed a method to control the aerial vehicle and the robotic manipulator separately. The latter can be moved through a standard position-based and/or kinematic controller. At the same time, the former has to compensate for the arm's movements and translate towards the desired position in the Cartesian space. Therefore, an estimator of generalized external forces (forces plus moments) acting on the aerial vehicle and based on the mechanical momentum of the system is developed. Other techniques dealing with the interaction with the environment have also been developed.

A literature review about aerial manipulation is published by Fabio Ruggiero:

• F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, A. Ollero, Aerial manipulation: A literature review, in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, n. 3, pp. 1957-1964, 2018, DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2018.2808541.

Proposed solutions:

• F. RUGGIERO, J. Cacace, H. Sadeghian, V. Lippiello, Passivity-based control of VTOL-UAVs with a momentum-based estimator of external wrench and unknown dynamics, in Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 72, pp. 139-151, 2015, DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2015.05.006.
• V. Lippiello, G.A. Fontanelli, F. RUGGIERO, Image-based visual-impedance control of a dual-arm aerial manipulator, in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, n. 3, pp. 1856-1863, 2018, DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2018.2806091.
• S.M. Orozco Sotos, J. Cacace, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, Active disturbance rejec- tion control for the robust flight of a passively tilted hexarotor, in Drones, vol. 6, n. 9, 258, 2022, DOI: 10.3390/drones6090258.
• S.M. Orozco Sotos, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, Globally attractive hyperbolic control for the robust flight of an actively tilting quadrotor, in Drones, vol. 6, n. 12, 373, 2022, DOI: 10.3390/drones6120373.
• J. Cacace, L. Giampetraglia, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, A novel gripper prototype for helical bird diverter manipulation, in Drones, vol. 7, n. 1, 60, 2023, DOI: 10.3390/drones7010060.
• F. RUGGIERO, Decentralized control of aerial manipulators through a momentum-based estimator, in Aerial Robotic Manipulation. Research, Development and Applications, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, A. Ollero and B. Siciliano (eds), vol. 129, pp. 159-174, Springer, Cham, 2019. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-12945-3_11.
• V. Lippiello, F. RUGGIERO, Cartesian impedance control of a UAV with a robotic arm, 10th International IFAC Symposium on Robot Control, Dubrovnik, HR, pp. 704-709, 2012, DOI: 10.3182/20120905-3-HR-2030.00158.
• V. Lippiello, F. RUGGIERO, Exploiting redundancy in Cartesian impedance control of UAVs equipped with a robotic arm, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Vilamoura, P, pp. 3768-3773, 2012, DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2012.6386021.
• F. RUGGIERO, J. Cacace, H. Sadeghian, V. Lippiello, Impedance control of VToL UAVs with a momentum-based external generalized forces estimator, 2014 IEEE In- ternational Conference on Robotics and Automation, Hong Kong, C, pp. 2093-2099, 2014, DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2014.6907146.
• F. RUGGIERO, M. Trujillo, R. Cano, H. Ascorbe, A. Viguria, C. Peréz, V. Lippiello, A. Ollero, B. Siciliano, A multilayer control for multirotor UAVs equipped with a servo robot arm, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 4014-4020, 2015, DOI: 10.1109/ICRA.2015.7139760.
• E. Cuniato, J. Cacace, M. Selvaggio, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, A hardware-in- the-loop simulator for physical human-aerial manipulator cooperation, 20th International Conference on Advanced Robotics, Slovenia, pp. 830-835, 2021, DOI: 10.1109/ICAR53236.2021.9659398.
• S. D’Angelo, F. Pagano, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, Development of a control frame- work to autonomously install clip bird diverters on high-voltage lines, 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Warsaw, Poland, 2023 (in press).
• S. Roos-Hoefgeest Toribio, J. Cacace, V. Scognamiglio, I. Alvarez, R.C. González de los Reyes, F. RUGGIERO, V. Lippiello, A vision-based approach for unmanned aerial vehicles to track industrial pipes for inspection tasks, 2023 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Warsaw, Poland, 2023 (in press).