Dual Quaternion Based Contact Modeling for Fast and Smooth Collision Recovery of Quadrotors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual quaternion impulse reset map on SE(3) for quadrotor collision recovery, improving stability and reducing latency through a unified impact model and energy-dissipating controller.

Contribution

It presents a novel dual quaternion-based impact model on SE(3) that captures normal and tangential impulses in a single expression, enhancing collision recovery.

Findings

24% reduction in execution latency compared to matrix-based implementation

50.8%-75.1% reduction in position RMSE in simulations

68.7%-85% decrease in peak kinetic energy during impacts

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in cluttered environments require efficient and accurate impact modeling to maintain stability post collisions, however classical impulse contact models decouple the normal and tangential components. This letter presents a dual quaternion impulse reset map directly on the SE(3) manifold. By operating on the unified spatial twist (unified linear and angular velocities), the proposed formulation retains the cross-coupling between normal and tangential impulse components in a single closed-form expression, and recovers the classical decoupled Newton impulse model as a special case. A recovery controller is designed that couples linear and angular momentum to enforce kinetic energy dissipation across impacts. Hardware-in-the-loop benchmarks demonstrate a 24\% reduction in execution latency compared to an optimized matrix-based implementation, and a 20\% reduction relative to a position-plus-quaternion (PQ) formulation. MuJoCo simulations across Monte Carlo sweeps over impact angles and friction coefficients show a 50.8\%-75.1\% reduction in position root-mean-square error (RMSE) and a 68.7\%-85\% decrease in peak kinetic energy compared to published linear-admittance baselines.