Singularity-free Aerial Deformation by Two-dimensional Multilinked Aerial Robot with 1-DoF Vectorable Propeller

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel two-dimensional multilinked aerial robot with a 1-DoF vectorable propeller to avoid singularities during deformation, enabling improved maneuverability and manipulation.

Contribution

It extends modeling and control methods for under-actuated robots and proposes a planning approach to prevent singularities by optimizing vectoring angles.

Findings

Successfully avoids singularities during deformation

Enables trajectory tracking in challenging shapes

Demonstrates improved maneuverability in experiments

Abstract

Two-dimensional multilinked structures can benefit aerial robots in both maneuvering and manipulation because of their deformation ability. However, certain types of singular forms must be avoided during deformation. Hence, an additional 1 Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) vectorable propeller is employed in this work to overcome singular forms by properly changing the thrust direction. In this paper, we first extend modeling and control methods from our previous works for an under-actuated model whose thrust forces are not unidirectional. We then propose a planning method for the vectoring angles to solve the singularity by maximizing the controllability under arbitrary robot forms. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed methods by experiments where a quad-type model is used to perform trajectory tracking under challenging forms, such as a line-shape form, and the deformation passing these challenging forms.