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Acceleration control of a multi-rotor UAV towards achieving microgravity

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Abstract

In this paper, we present control and parameter estimation strategies with theoretical guarantees to turn a hex-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into a microgravity enabling platform. We make the UAV to maintain a constant acceleration equal to free-fall acceleration for it and any payload on-board to experience microgravity. Towards this, we derive a feedback linearisation-based acceleration control law exploiting the differential flatness property of our system. The proposed control law requires the estimates of the system parameters. Therefore, ancillary to this control law, we propose a parameter estimation scheme and prove that the proposed control law along with the parameter estimation scheme ensures convergence of acceleration to the desired value under certain conditions. We also characterize these conditions that guarantee convergence. The flight tests that we have performed employing the proposed control and parameter estimation schemes gave microgravity levels of the order of \(10^{-3}g\) for 1.6 s. To our knowledge, our hex-rotor UAV is the first multi-rotor UAV to achieve microgravity, and the first UAV—fixed-wing or rotary—to attain and maintain such levels of microgravity.

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Notes

  1. Parabolic in time.

  2. g is the acceleration due to Earth’s gravity (9.81 \(\mathrm {\,\mathrm{m s}^{-2}}\)).

  3. Zero values for roll, pitch, and yaw Euler angles.

  4. Computation of \({{\hat{k}}_\mathrm {u}}\) is discussed in a subsequent section.

  5. We used the commercial software RotCFD [27] to perform the CFD analysis.

  6. Since if \(T=k\omega ^2\), then \(k=4\rho R^4 C_T\) and \(C_T\) is a function of \(\lambda _\mathrm {a}\).

  7. Flight tests were conducted when the disturbances due to wind were low.

  8. Note that the microgravity manoeuvres of fixed-wing UAVs are parabolic in both space and time—constant speed in forward direction and free-fall (constant acceleration g) in vertical direction.

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Kedarisetty, S., Manathara, J.G. Acceleration control of a multi-rotor UAV towards achieving microgravity. AS 2, 175–188 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42401-019-00031-z

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