Paolo Stegagno's website
References
[1] M. Odelga, P. Stegagno, and H. H. Bülthoff, A Fully Actuated Quadrotor UAV with a Propeller Tilting Mechanism: Modeling and Control, 2016 IEEE Int. Conf. on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics, Banff, Canada, July 2016. (download)
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Equipped with four actuators, quadrotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles belong to the family of underactuated systems. The lateral motion of such platforms is strongly coupled with their orientation and consequently it is not possible to track an arbitrary 6D trajectory in space.
In this project we have developed a novel quadrotor design in which the tilt angles of the propellers with respect to the quadrotor body are being simultaneously controlled with two additional actuators by employing the parallelogram principle.
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Since the velocity of the controlled tilt angles of the propellers does not appear directly in the derived dynamic model, the system cannot be static feedback linearized. Nevertheless, the system is linearizable at a higher differential order, leading to a dynamic feedback linearization controller.
Design of Fully Actuated UAV's
Simulations confirm the theoretical findings, highlighting the improved motion capabilities with respect to standard quadrotors.
In the figure on the left, the orientation of the UAV is commanded without any change in its position. Similarly, with our design it is also possible to change the position of the UAV without any change in orientation, as shown in the simulation on the right.