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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully-actuated multirotor drone capable of maintaining a constant attitude during cargo transport, with a novel CoM estimation method ensuring stable flight despite payload changes.

Contribution

The paper presents a new fully-actuated multirotor design and a model-free CoM estimation technique inspired by ESC, enabling stable cargo transport with constant attitude.

Findings

Effective CoM estimation demonstrated through experiments

Stable constant-attitude flight achieved during cargo loading

Platform allows cargo placement at any point on the top surface

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.