Centroidal Aerodynamic Modeling and Control of Flying Multibody Robots

TL;DR

This paper develops a modeling and control framework for multibody flying robots that accounts for aerodynamic forces, using CFD data to create simplified models and improve control strategies, validated through simulations on a jet-powered humanoid robot.

Contribution

It introduces a novel aerodynamic modeling approach from CFD data and integrates it into control strategies for multibody flying robots.

Findings

CFD-based aerodynamic models improve control accuracy.

Feedback linearization and gain-scheduling enhance robustness.

Simulation validates effectiveness on iRonCub robot.

Abstract

This paper presents a modeling and control framework for multibody flying robots subject to non-negligible aerodynamic forces acting on the centroidal dynamics. First, aerodynamic forces are calculated during robot flight in different operating conditions by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis. Then, analytical models of the aerodynamics coefficients are generated from the dataset collected with CFD analysis. The obtained simplified aerodynamic model is also used to improve the flying robot control design. We present two control strategies: compensating for the aerodynamic effects via feedback linearization and enforcing the controller robustness with gain-scheduling. Simulation results on the jet-powered humanoid robot iRonCub validate the proposed approach.