An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection

Abstract

This paper presents an omnidirectional aerial manipulation platform for robust and responsive interaction with unstructured environments, toward the goal of contact-based inspection. The fully actuated tilt-rotor aerial system is equipped with a rigidly mounted end-effector, and is able to exert a 6 degree of freedom force and torque, decoupling the system's translational and rotational dynamics, and enabling precise interaction with the environment while maintaining stability. An impedance controller with selective apparent inertia is formulated to permit compliance in certain degrees of freedom while achieving precise trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection in others. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, pushand-slide interaction, and on-board state estimation with depth servoing to interact with local surfaces. The system is also validated as a tool for contact-based non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure.

Cartesian Aerial Manipulator with Compliant Arm

“…This feature is directly related to the performance of the multirotor position controller [30,31], affected by the endogenous and exogenous wrenches exerted through the manipulator [25,27]. On the one hand, tilted-rotor hexa-rotors, also known as fully actuated aerial platforms [32,33], allow the translation of the platform as well as the application of wrenches [34,35] without changing the orientation, which contributes to increasing the accuracy in the realization of manipulation tasks compared to coplanar multi-rotors. On the other hand, the error propagation at the end effector is closely related with the kinematic configuration and the physical construction of the manipulator.…”

“…For the multirotor: take-off, land, follow trajectory, go to workspace, approach reference position, interaction force control [25,27,[33][34][35]37].…”

Design and optimal control of a tiltrotor micro-aerial vehicle for efficient omnidirectional flight

“…This article extends upon the work presented at the 2018 International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER 2018) (Bodie et al, 2019(Bodie et al, , 2018, and is structured as follows. Section 2 states assumptions and notation, and derives a general model of the tiltrotor OMAV.…”

“…. Previous works (Bodie et al, 2019;Kamel et al, 2018;Ryll et al, 2015) exploit the rigid body model from (4) in combination with the aerodynamic force model from (8) to compute actuator commands based on a thrust vectoring control. Force and torque commands are computed from position and attitude errors respectively and actuator commands can be resolved using the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse of the static allocation matrix:X…”

Inspection-while-flying: An autonomous contact-based nondestructive test using UAV-tools

“…In this implementation, a one DoF manipulator is added on UAV and the overall system is controlled by PID. This study is extended in [47] operation [48], without considering aerodynamic forces which can be troublesome in a close proximity flight to the ceiling.…”