Robust Control of a Miniature Ducted-Fan Aerial Robot for Blind Navigation in Unknown Populated Environments

This paper proposes a control strategy for a miniature ducted-fan aerial robot to safely perform flight missions in an unknown densely populated environment. The main novelty of the proposed framework is that the vehicle is assumed to be totally blind, namely the obstacles cannot be sensed a priori. Therefore, the presence of possible accidental contacts with the surrounding environment has to be taken into account. To maintain stability in such a complex scenario, mechanics, and control are co-designed. The proposed control strategy relies on some mechanical properties of the airframe, namely on the relative position of the contact points and of the onboard actuators, and on the design of a supervisor able to detect the presence of a contact only by observing the behavior of the flight control loop. The effectiveness of the obtained results is then demonstrated using experiments conducted on a ducted-fan prototype.