We introduce a control strategy for fully-actuated aerial vehicles to independently track trajectories in position and orientation. The technique is suited for platforms endowed with non-coplanar or vectoring-thrust rotors that change the orientation of the total thrust w.r.t. the body frame, thus achieving a complete exploitation of the 6 DoFs of the rigid body in 3D space. We introduce a new class of abstract aerial systems named Laterally Bounded Fully-Actuated vehicles (LBFA), in which most of the control authority is expressed along a principal thrust direction, while in the lateral directions a typically weaker force can be exploited to achieve full-pose tracking. LBFA systems naturally generalize underactuated aerial vehicles. We propose a geometric control for LBFAs that, once limited the set of admissible exerted forces within reasonable constraints, naturally extends the geometric control on SE(3) for underactuated aerial vehicles. The exponential tracking of a feasible full-pose reference trajectory is proven using a Lyapunov technique in SE(3). The controller can deal with both the under- and the fully-actuated configuration, without any issue of discontinuity. The controller guarantees the tracking of at least the positional part in the case that an unfeasible full-pose reference trajectory is provided.
['Antonio Franchi', 'Ruggero Carli', 'Davide Bicego', 'Markus Ryll']
Full-Pose Geometric Tracking Control on SE(3) for Laterally Bounded Fully-Actuated Aerial Vehicles