Control of Micro Aerial Vehicles under Aerodynamic and Physical Contact Interactions

这个项目的目标是使四旋翼机和其他类似的小型飞行旋翼机更安全，更容易飞行。这些车辆的娱乐和商业用途最近都很受欢迎。然而，对潜在的破坏性碰撞的安全担忧限制了它们在靠近人群或密集编队中的部署，而且目前的车辆控制水平还不足以满足在工业厂房、森林和洞穴等复杂结构内部飞行的潜在应用。具体来说，该项目将带来以下创新：通过新颖的模型更好地理解环境与飞行器之间的空气动力学相互作用；创造一个“智能笼子”，它包围着车辆，既可以作为减震器，也可以作为一种新型的“触摸”传感器；并推导了新的控制策略，以利用新的特性来提高性能和易操控性。总之，这些创新将使小型车辆不太可能造成意外损坏，适合在洞穴等极端环境中使用，并且更容易驾驶。这将允许在新的工业监控和搜索救援应用中使用这些车辆，从而将这些平台的好处带给更大的社会群体。该项目的技术目标将建立在新的四旋翼气动模型上，通过模拟和实验评估相结合来构建。这些模型预测由于每个转子与其他转子以及与附近表面（如地面、墙壁和天花板）的空气动力学相互作用而产生的力和扭矩。“智能笼子”围绕着飞行器，由防止四旋翼接触环境中的物体的刚性外壳和刚性附着在四旋翼上的基座组成。保持架和底座通过一个用来吸收冲击的弹簧系统连接在一起。底座包括用于测量外壳相对位移的传感器，从而允许对任何冲击动力学进行部分重建。基于收缩理论在黎曼流形中的新应用，提出了新的控制策略。这些策略产生的几何控制器不会受到奇点的影响，具有全局指数收敛保证，并且可以自动调整以获得最佳性能。结果将在仿真和实验中得到验证。

The goal of this project is to make quadrotors and other similar small-scale flying rotorcraft safer and easier to fly. Both recreational and commercial use of these vehicles has recently surged in popularity. However, safety concerns about potentially damaging collisions limit their deployment near people or in close formation, and the current state of the art in vehicle control is insufficient for potential applications involving flight inside of complicated structures such as industrial plants, forests and caves. Specifically, this project will lead to the following innovations: better understanding of the aerodynamic interactions between the environment and the flying vehicle through novel models; creation of a "smart cage" that encloses the vehicle and acts as both a shock-absorber and as a novel type of "touch" sensor; and the derivation of new control strategies to take advantage of the new features to improve performances and ease of maneuvering. Together, these innovations will make small-scale vehicles less likely to cause unintended damage, suitable for use in extreme environments such as caves, and more easily piloted. This will allow in turn the use of these vehicles in new industrial monitoring and search-and-rescue applications, thus bringing the benefits of these platforms to larger segments of society. The technical goals of this project will build on new models of quadrotor aerodynamic, constructed through a combination of simulation and experimental evaluation. These models predict forces and torques due to the aerodynamic interactions of each rotor with the other rotors, as well as with nearby surfaces, such as ground, walls, and ceilings. A "smart cage" surrounds the vehicle, composed of a rigid outer shell to prevent the quadrotor from contacting objects in the environment, and a base, which is rigidly attached to the quadrotor. The cage and the base connect together through a system of springs that are used to absorb impacts. The base includes sensors to measure the relative displacement of the outer shell, thus allowing a partial reconstruction of any impact dynamics. New control strategies are formulated, based on a novel application of contraction theory to Riemannian manifolds. These strategies produce geometric controllers that do not suffer from singularities, that have global exponential convergence guarantees, and that can be automatically tuned to obtain optimal performance. The results will be validated in both simulations and experiments.