A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors, chassis, suspension, and the deformable structure. In addition, a model-based controller is designed for landing and mode switching in various unstructured conditions, such as slopes and curved surface. And considering locomotion and complex near-ground situations to achieve cooperation between the two fused modalities. This system was simulated in ADAMS/Simulink and a tested with hardware-in-the-loop system was constructed for testing in various slopes. With a designed controller, the results showed the robot is capable of fast and smooth land-air switching, with a 24.6 % faster landing on slopes. The controller can also reduce landing offset and impact force more effectively than the normal control method at 32.7 % and 34.3 %, respectively.
@article{arxiv.2211.04185,
title = {Coupled Modeling and Fusion Control for a Multi-modal Deformable Land-air Robot},
author = {Xinyu Zhang and Yuanhao Huang and Kangyao Huang and Ziqi Zhao and Jingwei Li and Huaping Liu and Jun Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.04185},
year = {2022}
}