Modeling and Motion Control of a Fully Actuated Multirotor for Aerial Manipulation Using PX4 and ROS2

Aerial physical interaction and manipulation are increasingly in demand for various industrial applications. Research groups are striving to create innovative fully actuated designs tailored to these needs. However, creating custom flight stacks and software drivers often slows development and impedes research replication and benchmarking. This paper aims to leverage open-source libraries to accelerate the development and testing of new fully actuated vehicles. The proposed modeling and control framework utilizes the widely adopted ROS2 middleware and PX4 flight stack to develop and control fully actuated multirotors. This paper details the modeling and motion control, with relevant code and guides made open-source for others to build upon. The proposed architecture was used to develop and control a fully-actuated hexarotor which achieved independent rotational and translational motions with coupling disturbances below 6cm and 0.5 degree in the horizontal position and tilt angles respectively.