Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatility 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.

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It is generally accepted that systems composed of multiple aerial robots with autonomous cooperation capabilities can assist responders in many search and rescue (SAR) scenarios.In most of the previous research work, the aerial robots are mainly considered as platforms for environmental sensing and have not been used to assist victims. In this paper, outdoors field experiments of transportation and accurate deployment of loads, with single/multiple autonomous aerial vehicles are presented. This is a novel feature that opens the possibility to use aerial robots to assist victims during the rescue phase operations. cooperative sensing, using several different sensor types. The system supports several forms of cooperative actuation as well, ranging from the cooperative deployment of small sensors/objects to the coupled transportation of slung loads.Within this paper the complete system is described, outlining the used hardware and software framework, as well as the used approaches for modeling and control. Additionally, the results of several flight field experiments are presented, including the description of the worldwide first successful autonomous load transportation experiment, using three coupled small size helicopters (conducted in December 2007). During these experiments strong steady winds and wind gusts were present. Various solutions and lessons learned from the design and operation of the system are also provided.

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This paper presents the design and control of a multirotor-based aerial manipulator developed for outdoor operation. The multi-rotor has eight rotors and large payload to integrate a 7-degrees of freedom arm and to carry sensors and processing hardware needed for outdoor positioning. The arm can also carry an end-effector and sensors to perform different missions. The paper focuses on the control design and implementation aspects. A stable backstepping-based controller for the multirotor that uses the coupled full dynamic model is proposed, and an admittance controller for the manipulator arm is outlined. Several experimental tests with the aerial manipulator are also presented. In one of the experiments, the performance of the pitch attitude controller is compared to a PID controller. Other experiments of the arm controller following an object with the camera are also presented.

This paper presents a cooperative perception system for multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It considers different kind of sensors: infrared and visual cameras and fire detectors. The system is based on a set of multipurpose low‐level image‐processing functions including segmentation, stabilization of sequences of images, and geo‐referencing, and it also involves data fusion algorithms for cooperative perception. It has been tested in field experiments that pursued autonomous multi‐UAV cooperative detection, monitoring, and measurement of forest fires. This paper presents the overall architecture of the perception system, describes some of the implemented cooperative perception techniques, and shows experimental results on automatic forest fire detection and localization with cooperating UAVs. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This paper summarizes new aerial robotic manipulation technologies and methods, required for outdoor industrial inspection and maintenance, developed in the AEROARMS project. It presents aerial robotic manipulators with dual arms and multi-directional thrusters. It deals with the control systems, including the control of the interaction forces and the compliance, the teleoperation, which uses passivity to tackle the tradeoff between stability and performance, perception methods for localization, mapping and inspection, and planning methods, including a new control-aware approach for aerial manipulation. Finally, it describes a novel industrial platform with multidirectional thrusters and a new arm design to increase the robustness in industrial contact inspections. The lessons learned in the application to outdoor aerial manipulation for inspection and maintenance are pointed out.

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