Torque-Thrust Integrated Inverse Dynamics for Rotor Distributed Manipulator Toward Dynamic Deformation

In recent years, manipulation tasks in high place by aerial robots have been realized. In particular, rotor distributed manipulators equipped with rotors on each link of articulated structure have attracted attention for their ability to perform high DoF tasks through whole-body deformation. However, in many conventional rotor distributed robots, joint control and thrust control were separated for model simpli- fication, or the dynamics of joint motion were ignored and robot body was approximated as a rigid multirotor at each control cycle. As a result, they are mainly applied to tasks comprising static motion, and its application to tasks requiring dynamic deformation is limited. Therefore, in this work, we aim to enable dynamic deformation by a rotor distributed manipulator. We clarify the whole-body dynamics model of a rotor distributed manipulator that integrate joint torque and thrust, and develop its control system. In the proposed inverse dynamics method, we formulate a problem based on quadratic programming to minimize the exerted thrust and joint torque while achieving the desired whole-body motion. Then, we implement a control system for a rotor distributed manipulator incorporating the proposed inverse dynamics method. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through trajectory generation of actuator inputs and dynamic motion simulation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to establish a control system for dynamic deformation by integrating joint torque and thrust for rotor distributed robots.