Design of an Anthropomorphic, Compliant, and Lightweight Dual Arm for Aerial Manipulation

This paper presents an anthropomorphic, compliant and lightweight dual arm manipulator designed and developed for aerial manipulation applications with multi-rotor platforms. Each arm provides four degrees of freedom in a human-like kinematic configuration for end effector positioning: shoulder pitch, roll and yaw, and elbow pitch. The dual arm, weighting 1.3 kg in total, employs smart servo actuators and a customized and carefully designed aluminum frame structure manufactured by laser cut. The proposed design reduces the manufacturing cost as no computer numerical control machined part is used. Mechanical joint compliance is provided in all the joints, introducing a compact spring-lever transmission mechanism between the servo shaft and the links, integrating a potentiometer for measuring the deflection of the joints. The servo actuators are partially or fully isolated against impacts and overloads thanks to the ange bearings attached to the frame structure that support the rotation of the links and the deflection of the joints. This simple mechanism increases the robustness of the arms and safety in the physical interactions between the aerial robot and the environment. The developed manipulator has been validated through different experiments in fixed base test-bench and in outdoor flight tests.Unión Europea H2020-ICT-2014- 644271Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2015-71524-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2017-89790-

Visual Servoing for the Robotenis System: a Strategy for a 3 DOF Parallel Robot to Hit a Ping-Pong Ball

This article describes a new visual servo control and strategies that are used to carry out dynamic tasks by the Robotenis platform. This platform is basically a parallel robot that is equipped with an acquisition and processing system of visual information, its main feature is that it has a completely open architecture control, and planned in order to design, implement, test and compare control strategies and algorithms (visual and actuated joint controllers). Following sections describe a new visual control strategy specially designed to track and intercept objects in 3D space. The results are compared with a controller shown in previous woks, where the end effector of the robot keeps a constant distance from the tracked object. In this work, the controller is specially designed in order to allow changes in the tracking reference. Changes in the tracking reference can be used to grip an object that is under movement, or as in this case, hitting a hanging Ping-Pong ball. Lyapunov stability is taken into account in the controller design

Dynamic Visual Servoing for Ping-Pong Game of a 3DOF PKM

This article describes the new visual servo control and strategies that are utilized to carry out dynamic tasks by the system Robotenis. This platform is a parallel robot that is equipped with an acquisition and processing system of visual information. Its main feature is that it has a completely open architecture control, planned in order to design, implement, test and compare control strategies and algorithms (visual and actuated joint controllers). Following sections describe a new visual control strategy specially designed to track dynamic objects in 3D space. Contrasting the strategies shown in previous works, where the end effect or of the robot keeps a constant distance from the tracked object, in this work the controller is specially designed in order to allow changes the tracking reference. Changes in the tracking reference can be utilized to grip an object that is under movement or as in this case, Ping-Pong playing. Lyapunov stability is taken into account in the controller design

Visual and Kinematic Coordinated Control of Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Manipulating objects using arms mounted to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is attractive because UAVs may access many locations that are otherwise inaccessible to traditional mobile manipulation platforms such as ground vehicles. Historically, UAVs have been employed in ways that avoid interaction with the environment at all costs. The recent trend of increasing small UAV lift capacity and the reduction of the weight of manipulator components make the realization of mobile manipulating UAVs imminent. Despite recent work, several major challenges remain to be overcome before it will be common practice to manipulate objects from UAVs. Among these challenges, the constantly moving UAV platform and compliance of manipulator arms make it difficult to position the UAV and end-effector relative to an object of interest precisely enough for reliable manipulation. Solving this challenge will bring UAVs one step closer to being able to perform meaningful tasks such as infrastructure repair, disaster response, law enforcement, and personal assistance. Toward a solution to this challenge, this thesis describes a way forward that uses the UAV as a means to crudely position a manipulator within reach of the end-effector's goal position in the world. The manipulator then performs the fine positioning of the end-effector, rejecting position perturbations caused by UAV motions. An algorithm to coordinate the redundant degrees of freedom of an aerial manipulation system is described that allows the motions of the manipulator to serve as inputs to the UAV's position controller. To demonstrate this algorithm, the manipulator's six degrees of freedom are servoed using visual sensing to drive an eye-in-hand camera to a specified pose relative to a target while treating motions of the host platform as perturbations. Simultaneously, the host platform's degrees of freedom are regulated using kinematic information from the manipulator. This ultimately drives the UAV to a position that allows the manipulator to assume a pose relative to the UAV that maximizes reachability, thus facilitating the arm's ability to compensate for undesired UAV motions. Maintaining this loose kinematic coupling between the redundant degrees of freedom of the host UAV and manipulator allows this type of controller to be applied to a wide variety of platforms, including manned aircraft, rather than a single instance of a purpose-built system. As a result of this loose coupling, careful consideration must be given to the manipulator design so that it can achieve useful poses while minimally influencing the stability of the host UAV. Accordingly, the novel application of a parallel manipulator mechanism is described.Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering -- Drexel University, 201

Hierarchical task control for aerial inspection

This paper presents a task oriented control strategy for aerial vehicles equipped with a robotic arm and a camera attached to its end-effector. With this setting the camera can reach a new set of orientations previously not feasible for the quadrotor. The over-actuation of the whole system is exploited with a hierarchical control law to achieve a primary task consisting on a visual servoing control, whilst secondary tasks can also be attained to minimize gravitational effects or undesired arm configurations. Results are shown in a Robot Operating System (ROS) simulation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Two solutions to the adaptive visual servoing problem

Published versio

Uncalibrated visual servo for unmanned aerial manipulation

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper addresses the problem of autonomous servoing an unmanned redundant aerial manipulator using computer vision. The overactuation of the system is exploited by means of a hierarchical control law, which allows to prioritize several tasks during flight. We propose a safety-related primary task to avoid possible collisions. As a secondary task, we present an uncalibrated image-based visual servo strategy to drive the arm end-effector to a desired position and orientation by using a camera attached to it. In contrast to the previous visual servo approaches, a known value of camera focal length is not strictly required. To further improve flight behavior, we hierarchically add one task to reduce dynamic effects by vertically aligning the arm center of gravity to the multirotor gravitational vector, and another one that keeps the arm close to a desired configuration of high manipulability and avoiding arm joint limits. The performance of the hierarchical control law, with and without activation of each of the tasks, is shown in simulations and in real experiments confirming the viability of such prioritized control scheme for aerial manipulation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft