Publication

Nonlinear model predictive control for aerial manipulation

Conference Article

Conference

International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)

Edition

2017

Pages

87-93

Doc link

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2017.7991347

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

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.

Categories

aerospace robotics, predictive control.

Author keywords

nmpc

Scientific reference

D. Lunni, A. Santamaria-Navarro, R. Rossi, P. Rocco, L. Bascetta and J. Andrade-Cetto. Nonlinear model predictive control for aerial manipulation, 2017 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, 2017, Miami, pp. 87-93.