Gain Scheduling Position Control for Fully-Actuated Morphing Multi-Rotor UAVs

This work presents techniques for scheduling the position controller gains for a class of fully-actuated morphing multi-rotor UAVs that use synchronized tilting to change their actuation capabilities. The feasible set of forces and torques that can be produced by the platform changes with the tilting angle, thus the tracking and disturbance rejection capabilities also change. To exploit the platform limits, two methods are proposed for gain scheduling using a simplified example, then one method is tested in simulation with an omnidirectional morphing multi-rotor (OmniMorph). The simulation results show that the developed techniques achieve consistent position tracking performance along the range of tilting angles when rejecting step disturbance forces of values close to the maximum force capabilities. The proposed methods offer a trade-off between simplicity and accuracy, that could be potentially applied for any multi-rotor with synchronized tilting capabilities. A video summary can be found in: https://youtu.be/kH-rrO8gWeU