488 research outputs found
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
Continuous Autonomous UAV Inspection for FPSO vessels
This Master's thesis represents the preliminary design study and proposes
the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) -based inspection framework, comprising
several multirotors with automatic charging and deployment for 24/7
integrity inspection tasks. This project has three main topics. First one describes
the operational environment and existing regulations that cover use
of UAVs. It forms the basis for proposal of the relevant use-case scenarios.
Third part comprises two chapters, where design of concept and framework
is being based on the previous factors. It shows that before implementation
of fully autonomous inspection system, there is a need to cover both regulatory
and technical gaps. It can be explained by the fact that there does not
exist any autonomous inspection system today. Thus, this project can be
seen as a base for future development of the UAV-based inspection system,
as it focuses on creation of a general framework
Aerial Robotics for Inspection and Maintenance
Aerial robots with perception, navigation, and manipulation capabilities are extending the range of applications of drones, allowing the integration of different sensor devices and robotic manipulators to perform inspection and maintenance operations on infrastructures such as power lines, bridges, viaducts, or walls, involving typically physical interactions on flight. New research and technological challenges arise from applications demanding the benefits of aerial robots, particularly in outdoor environments. This book collects eleven papers from different research groups from Spain, Croatia, Italy, Japan, the USA, the Netherlands, and Denmark, focused on the design, development, and experimental validation of methods and technologies for inspection and maintenance using aerial robots
Image-based Visual Servo Control for Aerial Manipulation Using a Fully-Actuated UAV
Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform high-altitude manipulation
tasks beyond just passive visual application can reduce the time, cost, and
risk of human workers. Prior research on aerial manipulation has relied on
either ground truth state estimate or GPS/total station with some Simultaneous
Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, which may not be practical for many
applications close to infrastructure with degraded GPS signal or featureless
environments. Visual servo can avoid the need to estimate robot pose. Existing
works on visual servo for aerial manipulation either address solely
end-effector position control or rely on precise velocity measurement and
pre-defined visual visual marker with known pattern. Furthermore, most of
previous work used under-actuated UAVs, resulting in complicated mechanical and
hence control design for the end-effector. This paper develops an image-based
visual servo control strategy for bridge maintenance using a fully-actuated
UAV. The main components are (1) a visual line detection and tracking system,
(2) a hybrid impedance force and motion control system. Our approach does not
rely on either robot pose/velocity estimation from an external localization
system or pre-defined visual markers. The complexity of the mechanical system
and controller architecture is also minimized due to the fully-actuated nature.
Experiments show that the system can effectively execute motion tracking and
force holding using only the visual guidance for the bridge painting. To the
best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies on aerial manipulation
using visual servo that is capable of achieving both motion and force control
without the need of external pose/velocity information or pre-defined visual
guidance.Comment: Accepted by 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS
Modeling and nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system
Autonomous aerial robots have become an essential part of many civilian and military applications. The workspace and agility of these vehicles motivated great research interest resulting in various studies addressing their control architectures and mechanical configurations. Increasing autonomy enabled them to perform tasks such as surveillance, inspection and remote sensing in hazardous and challenging environments. The ongoing research promises further contributions to the society, in both theory and practice. To furthermore extend their vast applications, aerial robots are equipped with the tools to enable physical interaction with the environment. These tasks represent a great challenge due to the technological limitations as well as the lack of sophisticated methods necessary for the control of the system to perform desired operations in an efficient and stable manner. Modeling and control problem of an aerial manipulation is still an open research topic with many studies addressing these issues from different perspectives. This thesis deals with the nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system (AMS). The system consists of a quadrotor equipped with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator. The complete modeling of the system is done using the Euler-Lagrange method. A hierarchical nonlinear control structure which consists of outer and inner control loops has been utilized. Model Reference Adaptive Controller (MRAC) is designed for the outer loop where the required command signals are generated to force the quadrotor to move on a reference trajectory in the presence of mass uncertainties and reaction forces coming from the manipulator. For the inner loop, the attitude dynamics of the quadrotor and the joint dynamics of the 2-DOF robotic arm are considered as a fully actuated 5-DOF unified part of the AMS. Nonlinear adaptive control has been utilized for the low-level controller where the changes in inertias have been considered. The proposed controller is tested on a high fidelity AMS model in the presence of uncertainties, wind disturbances and measurement noise, and satisfactory trajectory tracking performance with improved robustness is achieved
Design of a Wireless Drone Recharging Station and a Special Robot End Effector for Installation on a Power Line
Drone autonomous operations near power lines are growing steadily and require innovative techniques to keep them on air. This paper presents a novel electromechanical recharging station that can be mounted on energized AC power line to charge the drone battery wirelessly without a need to modify the electrical infrastructure. The work shows a thorough analysis of the electrical and mechanical core components to build a flexible, lightweight and efficient recharging station that can be attached to a robotic arm. The work also discusses the recharging station design and its special robot end effector that mechanically couples the station with an aerial manipulator. Finally, the recharging station has been tested in the lab and in a real power line setup to validate its design and efficiency. The total achieved mass is 2300 grams with a harvesting efficiency of 77% at 250 A primary current
An overview of robotics and autonomous systems for harsh environments
Across a wide range of industries and applications, robotics and autonomous systems can fulfil the crucial and challenging tasks such as inspection, exploration, monitoring, drilling, sampling and mapping in areas of scientific discovery, disaster prevention, human rescue and infrastructure management, etc. However, in many situations, the associated environment is either too dangerous or inaccessible to humans. Hence, a wide range of robots have been developed and deployed to replace or aid humans in these activities. A look at these harsh environment applications of robotics demonstrate the diversity of technologies developed. This paper reviews some key application areas of robotics that involve interactions with harsh environments (such as search and rescue, space exploration, and deep-sea operations), gives an overview of the developed technologies and provides a discussion of the key trends and future directions common to many of these areas
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