A Pressure Washing Hosing-Drone – Mitigating Reaction Forces and Torques

In order to keep workers out of harm’s way and to improve the efficiency of infrastructure cleaning and inspection, a Hosing-Drone is proposed. The main challenge to implementing high pressure spraying with a UAV is compensating for the strong reaction forces and torques. Hose dynamics are explored with a series of experiments involving a free hose under high pressure flow in an infrared tracking testbed, an actuated hose with nozzle controlled via a gantry testbed, and with early field testing of the UAS. Analytic models for the dynamics are proposed and fit to experimental data. A simple control law inspired by the classic "cart-pendulum" problem is presented for eliminating swing in the dangling hose.