Date of Award
1-1-2018
Document Type
Masters Thesis
Degree Name
M.S.
Organizational Unit
Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical and Materials Engineering
First Advisor
Kimon Valavanis, Ph.D.
Second Advisor
Micheal Keables, Ph.D.
Third Advisor
Mohammad Mahoor
Fourth Advisor
Mathew Rutherford
Fifth Advisor
K.D. Kim
Keywords
Holonomic, Multirotor, Quadrotor, Thrust vectoring, UAS, UAV, Unmanned aerial vehicles, Unmanned aircraft systems
Abstract
A new type of fully-holonomic aerial vehicle is identified and developed that can optionally utilize automatic cancellation of excessive thruster forces to maintain precise control despite little or no throttle authority. After defining the physical attributes of the new vehicle, a flight control mixer algorithm is defined and presented. This mixer is an input/output abstraction that grants a flight control system (or pilot) full authority of the vehicle's position and orientation by means of an input translation vector and input torque vector. The mixer is shown to be general with respect to the number of thrusters in the system provided that they are distributed in a radially symmetric array. As the mixer is designed to operate independently of the chosen flight control system, it is completely agnostic to the type of control methodology implemented. Validation of both the vehicle's holonomic capabilities and efficacy of the flight control mixing algorithm are provided by a custom MATLAB-based rigid body simulation environment.
Publication Statement
Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.
Rights Holder
Joseph Nicholas Casabona
Provenance
Received from ProQuest
File Format
application/pdf
Language
en
File Size
137 p.
Recommended Citation
Casabona, Joseph Nicholas, "Force-Canceling Mixer Algorithm for Vehicles with Fully-Articulated Radially Symmetric Thruster Arrays" (2018). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1402.
https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1402
Copyright date
2018
Discipline
Robotics