Micro Aerial Vehicles for Environmental Interaction

We are interested in the design and control of autonomous micro aerial vehicles in unknown, cluttered environments. The applications for such MAVs range from search-and-rescue, security, surveillance, mapping, and remote sensing. Traditional vertical take-off and landing micro aerial vehicles are generally underactuated, i.e., equipped with fewer actuators than degrees-of-freedom. As a consequence, they possess a limited mobility because of their inherent underactuation (e.g., quadorotor helicopters can neither translate laterally with a zero attitude nor hover at a spot with a nonzero attitude). We would like a MAV to hover in place with any body orientation and be able to translate with a zero attitude. Additionally, we want to be able to arbitrarily orient a sensor or gripper attached to the MAV body during flight. In order to overcome the limitations of conventional MAVs and realize fully controllable MAVs, we are investigating new fully and over-actuated MAV configurations and actuation techniques.