Modeling and control of an interactive tilt-rotor MAV

The main goal of this paper is to model and control a tilt-rotor aerial robot for interactive operations via a 1DOF robotic manipulator. The modeling is derived by means of the Euler-Lagrange formulation, providing couplings between the robotic manipulator and the rotorcraft. The aerial robot is fully actuated and features thrust vector control, having a more flexible aerial profile. In terms of control, the Immersion and Invariance (I&I) control technique is applied in order to achieve the control objective (trajectory tracking). Likewise, the rotorcraft a mathematical model is extended to include a lumped disturbance encompassing parametric and external disturbances. For this reason, a Nonlinear Disturbance Observer (NDO) is designed to estimate and reject the disturbance adverse effects. Finally, preliminary simulation results were conducted to evaluate and validate the control strategy and the NDO for an interactive tilt-rotor micro aerial vehicle (MAV).