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.

In this letter, a hybrid visual servoing with a hierarchical task-composition control framework is described for aerial manipulation, i.e., for the control of an aerial vehicle endowed with a robot arm. The proposed approach suitably combines into a unique hybrid-control framework the main benefits of both image-based and position-based control schemes. Moreover, the underactuation of the aerial vehicle has been explicitly taken into account in a general formulation, together with a dynamic smooth activation mechanism. Both simulation case studies and experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed techniqu

This paper addresses the problem of autonomous servoing an unmanned redundant aerial manipulator using computer vision. The over-actuation 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 using a camera attached to it. In contrast to 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