On‐Board Digital Twin Based on Impedance and Model Predictive Control for Aerial Robot Grasping

Abstract

Aerial manipulation of objects has a number of advantages as it is not limited by the morphology of the terrain. One of the main problems of the aerial payload process is the lack of real‐time prediction of the interaction between the gripper of the aerial robot and the payload. This paper introduces a digital twin (DT) approach based on impedance control of the aerial payload transmission process. The impedance control technique is implemented to develop the target impedance based on emerging the mass of the payload and the model of the gripper fingers. Tracking the position of the interactional point between the fingers of gripper and payload, inside the impedance control, is achieved using model predictive control (MPD) approach. The developed on‐board DT offered a model where interaction with the unknown payload and aerial robot dynamics is informed. Beside this, the results showed the ability of the introduced DT to foretell the conditions of the forces acting on the payload which helped to predict the situation of aerial manipulation process. Additionally, the results showed that the DT model could detect real‐time errors in the physical asset.