Development of a Full Orientation Flight Robotics: Dynamics Modeling, Analysis, and Control Design

In this paper, a novel multi-rotor flight configuration, namely Full Orientation Flight RObotics (FOFRO), is developed. Different from the well-known quadrotor, the proposed multi-rotor-driven FOFRO is able to achieve arbitrary flight pose in a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) space. Therefore, the demands of flight flexibility and maneuverability can be greatly improved. On the basis of the designed prototype, the 6-DoF governing equations based on quaternion attitude kinematics are derived. Owing to the existence of the multi-rotor-driving redundancy, the optimal control allocation algorithm is further proposed to address the inverse mapping problem between the control signal channels and the actuator driving force channels. The algorithm provides a minimum-energy-consumption solution for a rotor speed to compose the designed control force under the satisfaction of practical physical constraints. To ensure the flight robustness in the realistic scenarios, a robust super-twisting sliding model controller is adopted to against unknown external disturbances. A numerical simulation is performed to illustrate the flight properties of the proposed FOFRO and to validate the feasibility of the proposed optimal control allocation algorithm. Simulation results also reveal that the proposed FOFRO can achieve arbitrary flight pose demands in the 6-DoF space, which demonstrate the high mobility of the proposed FOFRO.