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arXiv · 2301.06858

Design, Modeling and Control of a Top-loading Fully-Actuated Cargo Transportation Multirotor

Wooyong Park·Xiangyu Wu·Dongjae Lee·Seung Jae Lee
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Abstract

Existing multirotor-based cargo transportation does not maintain a constant cargo attitude due to underactuation; however, fragile payloads may require a consistent posture. The conventional method is also cumbersome when loading cargo, and the size of the cargo to be loaded is limited. To overcome these issues, we propose a new fully-actuated multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle platform capable of translational motion while maintaining a constant attitude. Our newly developed platform has a cubic exterior and can freely place cargo at any point on the flat top surface. However, the center-of-mass (CoM) position changes when cargo is loaded, leading to undesired attitudinal motion due to unwanted torque generation. To address this problem, we introduce a new model-free center-of-mass position estimation method inspired by the extremum-seeking control (ESC) technique. Experimental results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed estimation method, effectively estimating the CoM position and showing satisfactory constant-attitude flight performance.

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Wooyong Park, Xiangyu Wu, Dongjae Lee, Seung Jae Lee. 2023-01-17. Design, Modeling and Control of a Top-loading Fully-Actuated Cargo Transportation Multirotor. https://doi.org/10.1109/lra.2023.3300248

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