Design Of A Quadrotor With The Capability Of Aerial Manipulation

Unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)with the capability of aerial manipulation can greatly expand the field of application,which can be widely used in grasping and disposing dangerous goods,arranging and recycling of detection equipment,assembling the detection equipment and capturing the air targets.A quadrotor system with the capability of aerial manipulation is designed in this paper.The system consists of a quadrotor with 550mm diagonal size,a robotic arm which is 360mm in length and a gravity center adjusting mechanism.The gravity center adjusting mechanism is designed to reduce the impact of disturbance caused by the movement of robotic arm on the quadrotor.The aerial manipulator,consisted of robotic arm and gravity center adjusting mechanism,is mounted on the abdomen of quadrotor.The whole system weights about 2.5kg.The kinematics and dynamics of quadrotor and the aerial manipulator are modeled,respectively.The quadrotor and robot arm are controlled by independent controllers.A control strategy for the gravity center adjusting mechanism is designed based on the purpose to reduce the impact of disturbance caused by the movement of robotic arm.In order to evaluate the rationality of the system and effectiveness of the gravity center adjusting mechanism,all the models are imported to SimMechanics for simulation.Results of the simulation show that the gravity center adjusting mechanism and control strategy can significantly decrease the impact of disturbance caused by movement of robotic arm on the attitude control of quadrotor.Besides,a force test platform is built to measure the force of the quadrotor in fixed state.The validity of the gravity center adjusting mechanism is also proved by researching the force detected by test platform with or without the working of gravity center adjusting mechanism.Considering Phantom Omni haptic device and the PC as master devices,and the quadrotor with the capability of aerial manipulation as slave device,a master-slave system is set up.In the outdoor environment,the motion performance of quadrotor and the impact of robot arm on the flight stability are tested respectively.The aerial manipulating experiment is also carried out.The results show that the designed quadrotor with the capability of aerial manipulation has good maneuver and position control and yaw angle control can be responded rapidly.The gravity center adjusting mechanism can effectively reduce the impact of the robot arm movement on the quadrotor,which greatly improves the accuracy of the position control of the quadrotor.In the aerial manipulating experiment,the quadrotor and the robotic arm can be controlled harmoniously,so that the end effector can touch the object being grasped.