Paolo Stegagno's website
Among the several robotics fields, aerial robotics represents an emerging, promising, and one of the most rapidly growing topic. Aerial robots, also referred to as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), have the ability to reach hardly accessible areas, operate on rough terrains, while also enjoying a privileged point of view over the surroundings. Several application fields exploit the best of aerial robots characteristics in order to enhance our quality of life, safety and efficiency.
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This is the case of precision agriculture, in which aerial robots can be used to monitor and analyze crops from a privileged point of view, and to act when and only when necessary with crop dusting and spraying, eventually increasing the yield of a field while reducing the quantity of needed chemicals and water. In industrial scenarios, aerial robots will be used to monitor, inspect and intervene in hardly accessible or hazardous areas of plants, oil pipelines, power lines, pylons.
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Several environmental applications can be developed to monitor the effects of climate change, to help preserving wildlife and ecosystems (e.g.: automatically counting the exemplars in a species), identify issues and gather data for their solution. Similar strategies can be employed to monitor civil infrastructures as railways, highways, dams and bridges, not only to perform daily maintenance but also for early identification of critical issues and prevention of disasters. Finally, aerial robots will also appear in everyday life. They will be helpful companions in cleaning and maintenance, assisting the elderly and also as guides in unknown places. Moreover, they will be useful tools in an always growing number of jobs ranging from delivery to aerial photography and video shooting for television, cinema, shows, real estate promotion - or maybe just for fun!
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Here is a list of research topics that I have studied during my research career.
Quadrotor Control
The Super Twisting Controller (STC) is a robust controller capable of dealing with external disturbance as wind in outdoor flight. However, its performance are degrades by chattering around the equilibrium. We can solve this problem with a gain adaptation law which does not require the knowledge of the upper bound of the lumped disturbance.
Aerial Robotics
RGB-D based haptic teleoperation with onbord sensing and computation
The teleoperation of a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) can be employed in a great number of civil and industrial application comprising monitoring and inspection, 3D reconstruction and mapping. However, piloting this type of systems is difficult and requires many months of training. The role of the human operator can be greatly simplified by providing autonomy to the commanded robots. In particular, it is possible to: i) design innovative, simplified and intuitive ways for the human to provide command to the robots; ii) let the robots automatically avoid obstacles; iii) provide better and more informative feedback to the operator.
Cooperative Transportation of a Payload
A cable-suspended payload transported by a team of UAV's can be viewed as a reconfigurable cable-driven parallel robot (RCDPR). Taking advantage of this observation, we derive the full dynamic model of such system, and in particular a direct relation between the motion of the UAV’s and the motion of the payload. The resulting model is suitable to design a teleoperation system in which an operator can intuitively command the linear and angular velocity of the payload.
Design of Fully Actuated UAV's
Common multi-copters are underactuated robotic systems, and only their position and yaw angle can be independently controlled, while pitch and roll angles are completely determined by this choice. This limitation impair multi-copter ability to exert forces and physically interact with the environment. To overcome this limitation, we have designed a propeller-tilting mechanism to achieve complete independence of all linear and angular degrees of freedom.