Stable contact guaranteeing motion/force control for an aerial manipulator on an arbitrarily tilted surface

📃 Abstract: This study aims to design a motion/force controller for an aerial manipulator which guarantees the tracking of time-varying motion/force trajectories as well as the stability during the transition between free and contact motions. To this end, we model the force exerted on the end-effector as the Kelvin-Voigt linear model and estimate its parameters by recursive least-squares estimator. Then, the gains of the disturbance-observer (DOB)-based motion/force controller are calculated based on the stability conditions considering both the model uncertainties in the dynamic equation and switching between the free and contact motions. To validate the proposed controller, we conducted the time-varying motion/force tracking experiments with different approach speeds and orientations of the surface. The results show that our controller enables the aerial manipulator to track the time-varying motion/force trajectories.

✊ Motivation:

❗ There needs a motion/force controller for operations with higher precision for the tasks such as window-cleaning, painting, and non-destructive inspection.
❗ For the tasks such as teleoperation, multi-manual object manipulation and plug-pulling, the capability to track the timevarying motion/force trajectories is also required.

💡 Main contributions:

✔️ Tracking of time-varying motion/force trajectories
✔️ Stability during the transition between the free and contact motions
✔️ Gain-scheduling method based on stability conditions
✔️ Real-world time-varying force-tracking experiments on a tilted surfacer with different approach speeds

Bibtex

@inproceedings{byun2023stable,
  title={Stable contact guaranteeing motion/force control for an aerial manipulator on an arbitrarily tilted surface},
  author={Byun, Jeonghyun and Jang, Inkyu, Lee, Dongjae and Kim, H Jin},
  booktitle={2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  pages={--},
  year={2023},
  organization={IEEE}
}