Hours:
20 hours (5 credits)

Room:

Meeting Room, Dept. of Information Engineering, Largo Lazzarino 1, Pisa, Sixth Floor

To register to the course, click here

Short Abstract:

Multi-rotor aerial vehicles (MAVs)—commonly known as drones—are becoming increasingly ubiquitous due to their favorable characteristics, such as versatility and low cost, and their broad range of applications, ranging from industrial inspection to sustainable weed and crop management. Beyond traditional passive uses, where these robots monitor the environment (e.g., video recording, imaging, mapping), new directions have emerged—originating in research labs and now reaching the market—including dexterous designs capable of controlling the full 6D pose and instantaneously exerting forces in all directions. The field of aerial manipulation, which investigates physical interaction between aerial robots and their environment, has seen significant advances, enabling MAVs to perform contact-based tasks and transport both rigid and deformable objects, individually or cooperatively. In this course, you will explore the fundamentals and recent developments in MAV modeling and control, starting from the standard underactuated quadrotor to innovative fully-actuated designs. You will also examine how fully-actuated MAVs interact physically with their environment and how multiple quadrotors can collaboratively manipulate rigid and deformable objects.

Course Contents in brief:

1. Introduction: multi-rotor aerial robots, the Neutraweed project and other ongoing research at the Robotics and Mechatronics group of the University of Twente (45 min)
2. Propeller modeling (1h 15min)
3. Multi-rotor aerial robot dynamics (2h)
4. Quadrotor (2h)
5. Fully-actuated hexarotor with fixedly-tilted propellers (2h)
6. Aerial Manipulation: physical interaction control for a fully-actuated aerial manipulator (2h)
7. Omnidirectional tilting-propeller robot (2h)
8. Omnidirectional robot with synchronously tilting propellers (2h)
9. Aerial Manipulation: cable-suspended objects – modeling and differential flatness (2h)
10. Aerial Manipulation: deformable objects - modeling and differential flatness (2h)
11. Final Exam (2h)

Schedule:

1. 12/01/2026 8:30-12:30
2. 13/01/2026 8:30-12:30, 14:00-16:00
3. 14/01/2026 8:30-12:30
4. 15/01/2026 8:30-12:30
5. 16/01/2026 8:30-10:30 (Exam)