Abstract
Multirotor systems have traditionally been employed for missions that ensure minimal contact with the objects in their vicinity. However, their agile flight dynamics lets them sense, plan and react rapidly, and therefore perform highly dynamic missions. In this work, we push their operational envelope further by developing a complete framework that allows a multirotor to dock with a moving platform. Our approach builds on state-of-the-art and optimal methods for estimating and predicting the state of the moving platform, as well as for generating interception trajectories for the docking multirotor. Through a total of 25 field tests outdoors, we demonstrate the capabilities of our system in docking with a platform moving at different speeds and in various operating conditions. We also evaluate the quality of our system’s trajectory following at speeds over 2 m/s to effect docking within 10 s.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by NSF-IIS-1925052 -1924777, IIS-1638099, IIS-1925368, and USDA-NIFA 2017-67021-25924. Thanks to the members of the Nimbus Lab (Paul Fletcher, Ji Young Lee and Daniel Rico) for assisting with the field tests, and Jacob Hogberg (Research Engineer) for his design contributions to the docking subsystem.
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Shankar, A., Elbaum, S., Detweiler, C. (2021). Multirotor Docking with an Airborne Platform. In: Siciliano, B., Laschi, C., Khatib, O. (eds) Experimental Robotics. ISER 2020. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71151-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71151-1_5
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