Online Configuration Identification of a Composable Aerial Vehicle

This work focuses on the design of estimation algorithms able to identify the interconnection topology of a class of modular aerial vehicles obtained by rigidly interconnecting a number of actuator and payload modules. The idea is to obtain a composable aerial vehicle that can be easily assembled and then deployed on the selected application scenario without a priori knowledge of the exact final geometric structure. Two different scenarios are then addressed. In the first one, it is assumed that the modules can be interconnected only following a pre-defined scheme, namely the admissible geometric configurations constitute a discrete set. In the second one, no restrictions on the admissible geometric configuration are taken into account. The effectiveness of the proposed identification algorithms is finally shown by means of numerical simulations comprehensive of noises affecting the sensors' output.