Adaptive Control of Variable-Pitch Propellers: Pursuing Minimum-Effort Operation [conference paper]

Conference

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - May 31, 2020

Authors

Travis Henderson, Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos (professor)

Abstract

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) become more commonly used in industry, their performance will continue to be challenged. A performance bottleneck that is crucial to overcome is the design of electric propulsion systems for UAVs that operate in disparate flight modes (e.g., hovering and forward-moving flight). While flight mode dissimilarity presents a fundamental design challenge for fixed-geometry propulsion systems, variable-geometry systems such as the Variable Pitch Propeller (VPP) ones are able to provide superior propulsion performance across a wide range of flight modes. This work builds on previous work by the authors and presents a VPP system control and estimation framework for safe, near minimum-electrical-effort propulsion system behavior across the whole operation state space of any UAV. Multiple simulated validations are presented to support the feasibility of the approach.

Link to full paper

Adaptive Control of Variable-Pitch Propellers: Pursuing Minimum-Effort Operation

Keywords

robotics, autonomous aerial vehicles