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Contact-Persistent Full Actuation for Aerial Physical Interaction

Summary

A new control-theoretic framework called 'contact-persistent full actuation' is introduced for UAVs during physical interaction. It defines residual wrench sets and residual authority margins, going beyond rank-based certification. Numerical tests on a tilted hexarotor show that full row rank does not guarantee feasible contact; intermediate tilt angles preserve residual authority.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Abhimanyu Khadga, Abhinav Sinha, Shashi Ranjan Kumar
Contact-Persistent Full Actuation for Aerial Physical Interaction
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[Submitted on 22 Jul 2026]

Title:Contact-Persistent Full Actuation for Aerial Physical Interaction

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Abstract:Fully actuated unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are usually certified through rank conditions on a control-allocation matrix or through free-flight tracking performance. For aerial physical interaction, this certification may be incomplete. During sustained contact, part of the available wrench is consumed by the interaction task, and only the residual wrench remains available for stabilization, disturbance rejection, and maneuvering. This paper introduces a control-theoretic framework for \emph{contact-persistent full actuation}. A rigid-body model on $\R^{3}\times\SO\left(3\right)$ is combined with a morphology-dependent wrench map that captures fixed-tilt, variable-tilt, coaxial, and overactuated multirotor architectures. We define feasible wrench sets under actuator limits, residual wrench sets under task loading, and residual authority margins that strengthen the usual rank-based notion of full actuation. The main result shows that contact-persistent full actuation is equivalent to interiority of the task wrench in the constrained feasible wrench polytope, and that the residual authority radius is exactly the distance to the polytope boundary. We further introduce a signed residual-margin certificate for infeasible and boundary cases, a slack-maximizing allocation certificate, and a robust implementability condition that can be used as a margin-aware safety filter. Numerical evaluation on an abstract tilted hexarotor shows that full row rank alone does not imply feasible contact operation. Intermediate tilt angles preserve residual authority during pushing, whereas small or excessive tilts fail because of lateral-force deficiency or hover-margin loss.

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Systems and Control (eess.SY); Dynamical Systems (math.DS); Optimization and Control (math.OC)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.19708 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.19708v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.19708

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Abhinav Sinha [view email] [v1] Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:21:02 UTC (774 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • Introduces contact-persistent full actuation with residual authority margins and residual wrench sets.
  • Proves that contact-persistent full actuation is equivalent to the task wrench being interior to the constrained feasible wrench polytope.
  • Presents signed residual-margin certificate, slack-maximizing allocation certificate, and robust implementability condition.
  • Numerical evaluation shows full row rank alone insufficient for contact; intermediate tilt angles preserve authority.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.