Towards Aerial Robotic Workers

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to advance the control and estimation schemes for multirotors, and more specifically the Aerial Robotic Worker, in order to progress towards the necessary control and estimation performance for robust control, cooperation and collaboration. Towards this envisioned aim, this Licentiate thesis will present the following main research contributions: a) a singularity-free attitude controller for the attitude problem has been established, that does not have the inherent drawbacks of Euler angle or Direction Cosine Matrix based approaches, b) a generalized estimation scheme for attitude, position and parameter estimation will be presented that has the merit of low computational footprint, while it is robust towards magnetic disturbances and able to identify key parameters in the model of an Aerial Robotic Worker, c) an method for estimating the induced vibration frequencies on the multirotor’s frame, and the respective amplitudes, that relies on notch filtering for attenuating the induced vibrations, and d) a theoretical establishment, as well as an experimental development and evaluation of a variable pitch propeller model to add additional degrees of freedom and increase the robustness of an Aerial Robotic Worker. In the first part of this thesis the main contributions of the previous research approaches will be highlighted, while in the second part of the thesis the corresponding and in full detail articles will be presented.