Modeling and control of the interaction between flying robots and the environment

This work considers the problem of modeling and controlling a class of under- actuated aerial robots considering explicitly the interaction deriving from contacts with the environment and the resulting constraints which affect the system dynamics. The goal is to address a scenario in which unmanned aerial vehicles are allowed to accomplish tasks which may require contacts between the aerial vehicle and the environment, such as inspection of infrastructures or even remote manipulation. To this aim a novel control framework, based on a path following approach, is shown to succeed in achieving tasks such as docking / undocking to a certain working area.