Stefano Di Lucia

Contact

Autonomous Intelligent Systems

University of Freiburg

Room 079-1012

Georges-Koehler-Allee 079

79110 Freiburg im Breisgau

Germany

Phone: 98634

Email: dilucia@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

About me 

07/2007 - 12/2011: B.Sc. in Computer Science and Automatic Control Engineering, University of L'Aquila.

10/2011 - 04/2014: M.Sc. in Computer Science and Automatic Control Engineering, University of L'Aquila.

07/2014 - up to now: Working as a PhD Student at the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group headed by Wolfram Burgard at the University of Freiburg.

Current Work

The main aim of my research is to develop and design an Aerial Manipulator. In particular, the idea is to combine the mobility of an UAV with six propellers (Hexacopter), with the adroitness of a robotic arm. The final goal of the project is to capacitate  the Hexacopter to orientate and move itself in unstructured and dynamic environments and, at the same time, to grasp and manipulate different objects, for pick and place purposes, without the assistance of the humans. The principal step is to study the kinematics and dynamics model of the whole system (UAV and arm) and then develop a Non Linear Control in order to stabilize its attitude. The aerial manipulation introduces big problems in terms of controllability because the forces caused by arm movements and by ground contacts introduce destabilizing effects into an already unstable system. Considering the Hexacopter and the robot arm as a combined system, it was possible to develop a Robust Non Linear control law (Backstepping Control) for the system, that takes into account the motion of the arm. The simulations carried out in Matlab show how this kind of control works better than the standard PD control. Improvements of the control system  and Real-time implementation in the real device will be pursued as a further work.