학술논문

Learning Variable Impedance Control for Aerial Sliding on Uneven Heterogeneous Surfaces by Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 7(4):11275-11282 Oct, 2022
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Impedance
Surface impedance
Robot sensing systems
Robots
Sensors
Friction
Task analysis
Aerial systems: mechanics and control
compliance and impedance control
machine learning for robot control
reinforcement learning
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with partially-known environments, which may contain uncertainties including unknown spatially-varying friction properties and discontinuous variations of the surface geometry. Finding a solution that senses, adapts, and remains robust against these environmental uncertainties remains an open challenge. This letter presents a learning-based adaptive control strategy for aerial sliding tasks. In particular, the gains of a standard impedance controller are adjusted in real-time by a neural network policy based on proprioceptive and tactile sensing. This policy is trained in simulation with simplified actuator dynamics in a student-teacher learning setup. The real-world performance of the proposed approach is verified using a tilt-arm omnidirectional flying vehicle. The proposed controller structure combines data-driven and model-based control methods, enabling our approach to successfully transfer directly and without adaptation from simulation to the real platform. We attribute the success of the sim-to-real transfer to the inclusion of feedback control in the training and deployment. We achieved tracking performance and disturbance rejection that cannot be achieved using fine-tuned state of the art interaction control method.