Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering

This work addresses the interaction control problem of a fully actuated aerial vehicle considered as a flying end-effector. We tackle the problem using geometrically consistent variable-stiffness impedance control for safe wrench regulation using the concept of energy tanks, where both the modeling and the control are carried out in the port Hamiltonian framework. We exploit previous well-known results in the literature of ground manipulators and extend them to be applied for novel and challenging aerial physical interaction with a focus on quasi-static applications. The energy-awareness of the presented control method guarantees the stability of the aerial robot in both free-flight and in-contact scenarios together with a level of safety in the case of contact-loss with the unknown environment. Furthermore, by utilizing bond graphs we demonstrate how the closed-loop passivity can be graphically conducted. The validity of our proposed approach is shown via several experiments. We also provide several insights on how the proposed framework could be extended to a generic dynamic aerial physical interaction.