Nonlinear adaptive control of an aerial manipulation system

This paper presents the nonlinear adaptive control of a quadrotor endowed with a 2 degrees of freedom (DOF) manipulator. By considering the quadrotor and the robot arm as a combined system, complete modeling of the aerial manipulation system (AMS) has been presented using the Euler-Lagrange method. A hierarchical nonlinear control scheme 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 uncertainties and reaction forces coming from the manipulator. For the inner loop, the attitude dynamics of the quadrotor and the 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 and the masses have been tackled along with the reaction forces acting on the attitude part of the AMS. The proposed technique has been validated through simulations in two different scenarios

On vision enabled aerial manipulation for multirotors

This article presents an integrated vision-based guiding system for aerial manipulation. More specifically, a 4 DoF planar dexterous manipulator, with a stereo camera attached on the end-effector, is endowed to a multirotor aerial platform enabling active manipulation capabilities. The proposed novel approach combines a visual processing scheme for object detection and tracking, as well as a manipulator positioning for allowing the aerial platform to approach the surface of interaction efficiently. In the developed scheme, the object detection is based on correlation filters to track the target robustly, while the depth information, from the stereo camera on board the manipulator, is used to extract the centroid of the manipulated object, compute its relative configuration with respect to the UAV and align the end-effector properly with the grasping point. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is demonstrated in multiple experimental trials and simulations, highlighting it's applicability towards autonomous aerial manipulation.Collaborative Aerial Robotic Workers, AEROWORK