A Human-Embodied Drone for Dexterous Aerial Manipulation

Current drones perform a wide variety of tasks in surveillance, photography, agriculture, package delivery, etc. However, these tasks are performed passively without the use of human interaction. Aerial manipulation shifts this paradigm and implements drones with robotic arms that allow interaction with the environment rather than simply sensing it. For example, in construction, aerial manipulation in conjunction with human interaction could allow operators to perform several tasks, such as hosing decks, drill into surfaces, and sealing cracks via a drone. This integration with drones will henceforth be known as dexterous aerial manipulation. Our recent work integrated the worker’s experience into aerial manipulation using haptic technology. The net effect was such a system could enable the worker to leverage drones and complete tasks while utilizing haptics on the task site remotely. However, the tasks were completed within the operator’s line-of-sight. Until now, immersive AR/VR frameworks has rarely been integrated in aerial manipulation. Yet, such a framework allows the drones to embody and transport the operator’s senses, actions, and presence to a remote location in real-time. As a result, the operator can both physically interact with the environment and socially interact with actual workers on the worksite. This dissertation presents a human-embodied drone interface for dexterous aerial manipulation. Using VR/AR technology, the interface allows the operator to leverage their intelligence to collaboratively perform desired tasks anytime, anywhere with a drone that possesses great dexterity

Mobile-manipulating UAVs for Sensor Installation, Bridge Inspection and Maintenance

A parallel mechanism and smart gripper was designed and mounted on a rotorcraft drone to act as a robotic arm and hand. This empowers the drone to perform aerial manipulation and execute bridge maintenance. Hosing, drilling, and epoxying serve as case studies to test-and-evaluation and verify-and-validate the design. The approach, tasks, and findings are presented and show that the case studies are realizable. Conclusions and recommendations point to employing haptics-based human-in-the-loop approaches that can increase the scope of repair work involved in bridge maintenance

Towards Robotic Laboratory Automation Plug & Play: Survey and Concept Proposal on Teaching-free Robot Integration with the LAPP Digital Twin

The Laboratory Automation Plug & Play (LAPP) framework is an over-arching reference architecture concept for the integration of robots in life science laboratories. The plug & play nature lies in the fact that manual configuration is not required, including the teaching of the robots. In this paper a digital twin (DT) based concept is proposed that outlines the types of information that have to be provided for each relevant component of the system. In particular, for the devices interfacing with the robot, the robot positions have to be defined beforehand in a device-attached coordinate system (CS) by the vendor. This CS has to be detectable by the vision system of the robot by means of optical markers placed on the front side of the device. With that, the robot is capable of tending the machine by performing the pick-and-place type transportation of standard sample carriers. This basic use case is the primary scope of the LAPP-DT framework. The hardware scope is limited to simple benchtop and mobile manipulators with parallel grippers at this stage. This paper first provides an overview of relevant literature and state-of-the-art solutions, after which it outlines the framework on the conceptual level, followed by the specification of the relevant DT parameters for the robot, for the devices and for the facility. Finally, appropriate technologies and strategies are identified for the implementation