Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review

Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatil- ity and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature review of general aerial robotics and space manipulation is carried out as well

A review of aerial manipulation of small-scale rotorcraft unmanned robotic systems

Small-scale rotorcraft unmanned robotic systems (SRURSs) are a kind of unmanned rotorcraft with manipulating devices. This review aims to provide an overview on aerial manipulation of SRURSs nowadays and promote relative research in the future. In the past decade, aerial manipulation of SRURSs has attracted the interest of researchers globally. This paper provides a literature review of the last 10 years (2008–2017) on SRURSs, and details achievements and challenges. Firstly, the definition, current state, development, classification, and challenges of SRURSs are introduced. Then, related papers are organized into two topical categories: mechanical structure design, and modeling and control. Following this, research groups involved in SRURS research and their major achievements are summarized and classified in the form of tables. The research groups are introduced in detail from seven parts. Finally, trends and challenges are compiled and presented to serve as a resource for researchers interested in aerial manipulation of SRURSs. The problem, trends, and challenges are described from three aspects. Conclusions of the paper are presented, and the future of SRURSs is discussed to enable further research interests

An Omnidirectional Aerial Platform for Multi-Robot Manipulation

The objectives of this work were the modeling, control and prototyping of a new fully-actuated aerial platform. Commonly, the multirotor aerial platforms are under-actuated vehicles, since the total propellers thrust can not be directed in every direction without inferring a vehicle body rotation. The most common fully-actuated aerial platforms have tilted or tilting rotors that amplify the aerodynamic perturbations between the propellers, reducing the efficiency and the provided thrust. In order to overcome this limitation a novel platform, the ODQuad (OmniDirectional Quadrotor), has been proposed, which is composed by three main parts, the platform, the mobile and rotor frames, that are linked by means of two rotational joints, namely the roll and pitch joints. The ODQuad is able to orient the total thrust by moving only the propellers frame by means of the roll and pitch joints. Kinematic and dynamic models of the proposed multirotor have been derived using the Euler- Lagrange approach and a model-based controller has been designed. The latter is based on two control loops: an outer loop for vehicle position control and an inner one for vehicle orientation and roll-pitch joint control. The effectiveness of the controller has been tested by means of numerical simulations in the MATLAB c SimMechanics environment. In particular, tests in free motion and in object transportation tasks have been carried out. In the transportation task simulation, a momentum based observer is used to estimate the wrenches exchanged between the vehicle and the transported object. The ODQuad concept has been tested also in cooperative manipulation tasks. To this aim, a simulation model was considered, in which multiple ODQuads perform the manipulation of a bulky object with unknown inertial parameters which are identified in the first phase of the simulation. In order to reduce the mechanical stresses due to the manipulation and enhance the system robustness to the environment interactions, two admittance filters have been implemented: an external filter on the object motion and an internal one local for each multirotor. Finally, the prototyping process has been illustrated step by step. In particular, three CAD models have been designed. The ODQuad.01 has been used in the simulations and in a preliminary static analysis that investigated the torque values for a rough sizing of the roll-pitch joint actuators. Since in the ODQuad.01 the components specifications and the related manufacturing techniques have not been taken into account, a successive model, the ODQuad.02, has been designed. The ODQuad.02 design can be developed with aluminum or carbon fiber profiles and 3D printed parts, but each component must be custom manufactured. Finally, in order to shorten the prototype development time, the ODQuad.03 has been created, which includes some components of the off-the-shelf quadrotor Holybro X500 into a novel custom-built mechanical frame

A New Classification and Aerial Manipulation Q-PRR Design

International audienceThis paper presents a new designation and classification of system with UAV and robot manipulator where a new nomenclature is recognized as being the first contribution in the bibliography of design and systems. Several papers deal a problem of manipulation with a different unmanned aerial vehicle, robot arms and also with different naming of their systems, where the difficulty for locate and finding items and a good paper with its title or even by keywords, multirotor equipped with n-DoF robotic arm is the expression among the most widely used to describe that system. Aerial manipulation formula is presented and proved with a large example in the literature

Introduction to the Special Issue on Aerial Manipulation

The papers in this special section focus on aerial manipulation which is intended as grasping, positioning, assembling and disassembling of mechanical parts, measurement instruments and any other kind of objects, performed by a flying robot equipped with arms and grippers. Aerial manipulators can be helpful in those industrial and service applications that are considered very dangerous for a human operator. For instance, think of tasks like the inspection of a bridge, the inspection and the fixing-up of high-voltage electric lines, the repairing of rotor blades and so on. These tasks are both very unsafe and expensive because they require the performance of professional climbers and/or specialists in the field. A drone with manipulation capabilities can instead assist the human operator in these jobs or, at least, in the most hazardous and critical situations. As a matter of fact, such devices can indeed operate in dangerous tasks like reaching the bottom of the deck of a bridge or the highest places of a plant or a building; they can avoid dangerous work at height; aerial platforms can increase the total number of inspections of a plant, monitoring the wear of the components. Without doubts, aerial manipulation will improve the quality of the job of many workers

A survey of single and multi-UAV aerial manipulation

Aerial manipulation has direct application prospects in environment, construction, forestry, agriculture, search, and rescue. It can be used to pick and place objects and hence can be used for transportation of goods. Aerial manipulation can be used to perform operations in environments inaccessible or unsafe for human workers. This paper is a survey of recent research in aerial manipulation. The aerial manipulation research has diverse aspects, which include the designing of aerial manipulation platforms, manipulators, grippers, the control of aerial platform and manipulators, the interaction of aerial manipulator with the environment, through forces and torque. In particular, the review paper presents the survey of the airborne platforms that can be used for aerial manipulation including the new aerial platforms with aerial manipulation capability. We also classified the aerial grippers and aerial manipulators based on their designs and characteristics. The recent contributions regarding the control of the aerial manipulator platform is also discussed. The environment interaction of aerial manipulators is also surveyed which includes, different strategies used for end-effectors interaction with the environment, application of force, application of torque and visual servoing. A recent and growing interest of researchers about the multi-UAV collaborative aerial manipulation was also noticed and hence different strategies for collaborative aerial manipulation are also surveyed, discussed and critically analyzed. Some key challenges regarding outdoor aerial manipulation and energy constraints in aerial manipulation are also discussed

A novel aerial manipulation design, modelling and control for geometric com compensation

International audienceThis paper presents the design and modelling of a new Aerial manipulating system, that resolve a displacement of centre of gravity of the whole system with a mechanical device. A prismatic joint between the multirotor and a robotic arm is introduced to make a centre of mass as close as to the geometric centre of the whole system. This paper details also the geometric and dynamic modelling of a coupled system with a Lagrange formalism and control law with a Closed Loop Inverse Kinematic Algorithm (CLIKA). This dynamic inverse control is validated in a Simulink environment showing the efficiency of our approach

Passive Compliance Control of Aerial Manipulators

This paper presents a passive compliance control for aerial manipulators to achieve stable environmental interactions. The main challenge is the absence of actuation along body-planar directions of the aerial vehicle which might be required during the interaction to preserve passivity. The controller proposed in this paper guarantees passivity of the manipulator through a proper choice of end-effector coordinates, and that of vehicle fuselage is guaranteed by exploiting time domain passivity technique. Simulation studies validate the proposed approach.Comment: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201