A control architecture for physical human-UAV interaction with a fully actuated hexarotor

Physical human-UAV interaction (PHUI) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has many possible applications, and a few recent works [1], [2] have shown that it is possible to perform PHUI with a standard quadrotor. However, the intrinsic underactuation of quadrotors may hinder the interaction task and also cause safety issues. In this paper, we present an admittance control-based scheme to perform PHUI with a fully actuated UAV. The system also benefits from the robustness provided by our fully actuated UAV implementation of the adaptive super twisting controller (ASTC). While validating our system in simulation, we also show the superior performance of the fully actuated UAV with respect to a standard quadcopter.