UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Small drones are now common-place. However, they are each limited in how much load they can carry. Researchers in the Aerial Robots & Interaction Lab within the Department of Aerospace Engineering, led by Jenny Geng, are now training small drones to work together to carry larger loads. Ultimately, the vision is that the right number of drones can be applied for any mission.
Coordinating the movement of the drones faces the same difficulties faced by a team of people trying to carry a large load. As a fundamental requirement, each drone must be controlled to fly within its own flight envelope, while simultaneously carefully coordinating how the vehicles are distributed to not conflict with each other while carrying the payload smoothly. Dr. Geng’s unique “load-leading” design starts by calculating the desired “pose” of the payload, i.e. its desired position and orientation, from which it calculates the relative location and lift provided by each drone. To inform these calculations, the team of drones also steers the payload through flight patterns that let them learn in-flight about the payload’s mass, inertia, and location of center of mass, so that they can quickly learn how the payload can be the most accurately maneuvered.
This research started with Dr. Geng’s research towards her graduate degrees at Penn State working with Jack Langelaan (Ph.D. and M.S. in Aerospace Engineering with a minor in Electrical Engineering). After postdoctoral fellowships in the Coordinated Science Lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and then at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, she returned to Penn State in January 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering.
“Dr. Geng’s multi-lift project combines insights from aerospace engineering’s analysis of vehicle dynamics, control and guidance, with new perspectives from robotics about intelligent machines capable of learning,” notes Amy Pritchett, Professor and Head of Aerospace Engineering. “From these two different communities, she is creating a vision of aerial robots that can perceive and act in new ways, including acting together as teams.”
The multi-lift research will continue through an upcoming project sponsored by the Naval Air Warfare Center’s Aircraft Division titled “enabling operational multilift through vision-based control, scaling, and adaptation”, which seeks to transition these algorithms into an operational cooperative slung load transportation system.
November 13, 2023 – ARP