@article {2019e-TogTelGasSabBicMalLanSanRevCorFra, title = {A Truly Redundant Aerial Manipulator System with Application to Push-And-Slide Inspection in Industrial Plants}, journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters}, volume = {4}, year = {2019}, month = {04/2019}, pages = {1846-1851}, abstract = {We present the design, motion planning and control of an aerial manipulator for non-trivial physical interaction tasks, such as pushing while sliding on curved surfaces {\textendash} a task which is motivated by the increasing interest in autonomous non-destructive tests for industrial plants. The proposed aerial manipulator consists of a multidirectional-thrust aerial vehicle {\textendash} to enhance physical interaction capabilities {\textendash} endowed with a 2-DoFs lightweight arm {\textendash} to enlarge its workspace. This combination makes it a truly-redundant manipulator going beyond standard aerial manipulators based on collinear multi- rotor platforms. The controller is based on a PID method with a {\textquoteleft}displaced{\textquoteright} positional part that ensures asymptotic stability despite the arm elasticity. A kinodynamic task-constrained and control-aware global motion planner is used. Experiments show that the proposed aerial manipulator system, equipped with an Eddy Current probe, is able to scan a metallic pipe sliding the sensor over its surface and preserving the contact. From the measures, a weld on the pipe is successfully detected and mapped.}, doi = {10.1109/LRA.2019.2895880}, attachments = {https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2019e-TogTelGasSabBicMalLanSanRevCorFra-preprint.pdf , https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2019e-TogTelGasSabBicMalLanSanRevCorFra.mp4}, author = {Marco Tognon and Hermes Tello Chavez and Enrico Gasparin and Quentin Sabl{\'e} and Davide Bicego and Anthony Mallet and Marc Lany and Gilles Santi and Bernard Revaz and Juan Cort{\'e}s and Antonio Franchi} } @conference {2017c-FraMal, title = {Adaptive Closed-loop Speed Control of BLDC Motors with Applications to Multi-rotor Aerial Vehicles}, booktitle = {2017 IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation}, year = {2017}, month = {05/2017}, address = {Singapore}, abstract = { This paper introduces the adaptive bias and adaptive gain (ABAG) algorithm for closed-loop electronic speed control (ESC) of the brushless direct current (BLDC) motors typically used to spin the propellers in multi-rotor aerial robots. The ABAG algorithm is adaptive and robust in the sense that it does not require the knowledge of any mechanical/electrical parameter of the motor/propeller group and that neither a pre-calibration nor the knowledge of the feedforward/nominal input is needed. The ABAG algorithm is amenable to an extremely low complexity implementation. We experimentally prove that it can run in 27.5 μs on a 8 MHz microcontroller with no floating point unit and limited arithmetic capabilities allowing only 8-bit additions, subtractions and multiplications. Besides the controller implementation we present a self-contained open source software architecture that handles the entire speed control process, including clock synchronization, and over- current and blockage safeties. The excellent performance and robustness of ABAG are shown by experimental tests and aerial physical interaction experiments.}, attachments = {https://homepages.laas.fr/afranchi/robotics/sites/default/files/2017c-FraMal-preprint.pdf}, author = {Antonio Franchi and Anthony Mallet} }