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.

1.mp4 (41345 kB)
Demonstration Video 1

2.mp4 (26460 kB)
Demonstration Video 2

3.mp4 (27135 kB)
Demonstration Video 3

4.mp4 (28417 kB)
Demonstration Video 4

Discipline

Robotics



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