Dexterous Hexrotor - A Fully Actuated Nonparallel Hexrotor UAV

Dexterous Hexrotor is a six degree of freedom, truly holonomic aerial rotorcraft that provides force closure for controlled interaction with external structures. It is designed for aerial mobile manipulation tasks which is a burgeoning area of study in robotics.

Dexterous Hexrotor is equipped with six nonparallel thrusters. Each thruster is rotated a Cant angle around the radius of the frame and the six thrusters are arranged in three planes. So in-plane components of thruster vectors and six independent controlled degrees of freedom in force/torque space result while still maintaining a symmetric basis of vectors.

With a lightweight Stewart-Gough platform hosted by Dexterous Hexrotor, a macro/micro aerial mobile manipulation system is developed to investigate how much a fully actuated platform can improve the precision of position keeping and reduce the complexity of attitude control while performing manipulation tasks.

Publications

P. Abbaraju, M. Xin, J. Guangying, M. Rastgaar, and R. Voyles, "Aerodynamic Modeling for Multirotor UAVs with Nonparallel Actuators," in 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Sept 2021

P. Abbaraju, U. Kaur, H. McCarty, R.M. Voyles, "Clutter Slices Approach for Identification-on-the-Fly of Indoor Spaces," in: Del Bimbo A. et al. (eds) Pattern Recognition. ICPR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12667. Springer, Cham.

P. Abbaraju, M. Xin, Y. Huang, and R. Voyles, "Autonomous Physical Interaction of Exhaust Shafts and Smokestacks Using a Fully-Actuated UAV," in 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), Nov 2020.

P. Abbaraju, M. Xin, H. Manoj, V. Venkatesh, M. Rastgaar, and R. Voyles, "Inspection-on-the-fly using Hybrid Physical Interaction Control for Aerial Manipulators," in 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Oct 2020.

P. Abbaraju, H. Yang, H. Jang, and R. Voyles, "Aerial Mobile Manipulator System to Enable Dexterous Manipulations with Increased Precision," in 2019 IEEE ICRA workshop on High Accuracy Mobile Manipulation in Challenging Environments, May 2019.

P. Abbaraju, R. Voyles, "Sensing and Sampling of Trace Contaminations by a Dexterous Hexrotor UAV at Nuclear Facilities-18600," Proceedings of WM2018 Symposium, March 18–22, Phoenix, Arizona, USA (Best paper award).

P. Abbaraju, G. Jiang, R. Voyles, D. Cappelleri, D. McArthur, S. Mou, A. Yertay, R. Bean, A. Chowdhury, "Purpose-Built UAVs for Physical Sampling of Trace Contamination at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant-17331," Proceedings of WM2017 Symposium, March 5–9, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

G. Jiang, P. Abbaraju, R. Voyles, "Exhaust Shaft Inspection at the DOE WIPP Site," ANS 2016 Symposium on Decommissioning and Remote Systems, 2016.