Attitude and Thrust Strategies for Fully-Actuated Multirotors: The Fast-Track to Real-World Applications

The introduction of fully-actuated multirotors has opened the door to new possibilities and more efficient solutions to many real-world applications. However, their integration had been slower than expected, partly due to the need for new tools to take full advantage of these robots. As far as we know, all the groups currently working on the fully-actuated multirotors develop new full-pose (6-D) tools and methods to use their robots, which is inefficient, time-consuming, and requires many resources. We propose methods that extend the existing flight controllers to support the new fully-actuated robots and bridge the gap between the tools already available for underactuated robots and the new fully-actuated vehicles. We introduce attitude strategies that work with the underactuated planners, controllers, tools, and remote control interfaces, all while allowing taking advantage of the full actuation. Moreover, new methods are proposed that can properly handle the limited lateral thrust suffered by many fully-actuated UAV designs. The strategies are lightweight, simple, and allow rapid integration of the available tools with these new vehicles for the fast development of new real-world applications. The real experiments on our robots and simulations on several UAV architectures show how the strategies can be utilized. The source code of the PX4 firmware enhanced with the proposed methods and its simulator with our fully-actuated hexarotor model are provided with this paper. For more information, please visit https://theairlab.org/fully-actuated/.