Central aerodynamic modeling and control of a multi-body flying robot

Flying vehicles propose a lot of problems for researchers, such as passive vertical Take-off and Landing pass-through (VTOL) system. A recent arXiv.org paper presents an approach that looks at advanced aerodynamic modeling techniques to form simple models that are then used online to control a multi-flying robot. People.

iRonCub jet-powered humanoid robot. Image credit: arXiv: 2205.08301 [cs.RO]

The researchers propose a framework that includes aerodynamic forces in the design, modeling and control of high-degree-of-freedom VTOL systems. A series of computational fluid dynamics simulations are performed to generate a dataset of the aerodynamic forces acting on the robot for a given flight path. Then, the aerodynamic characteristics in the middle of the flight path are estimated.

This model is used to improve the flight control strategy by compensating for aerodynamic forces and improving the ruggedness of the controller.

This paper presents a modeling and control framework for a multiplayer flying robot that is subjected to negligible aerodynamic forces acting on centered dynamics. First, the aerodynamic forces are calculated during the robot flight under different operating conditions using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis method. Then, analytical models of the aerodynamic coefficients are generated from the data set collected with CFD analysis. The obtained simple aerodynamic model is also used to improve the control design of the flying robot. We present two control strategies: compensating for aerodynamic effects through feedback linearization and enforcing controller robustness with gain scheduling. Simulation results on the iRonCub jet-powered humanoid robot validate the proposed approach.

Research articles: Hui, T., “Central aerodynamic modeling and control of multi-body flying robots”, 2022. Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08301

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