Building tensile structures with flying machines

Abstract

This paper presents the building of lightweight tensile structures with quadrocopters. The construction elements (such as ropes, cables, and wires) in this kind of structure are subject to tension forces. This paper identifies the basic building elements (nodes, links) required for the construction of tensile structures, and translates them into meaningful trajectories for quadrocopters. The use of a library of building elements is suggested. Hybrid force-position control strategies based on admittance control are exploited. Prototypical tensile structures are built by quadrocopters to validate the proposed approach. An accompanying video shows the building process.

An Organic Computing Approach to Self-Organizing Robot Ensembles

“…The performance, in turn, is measured in terms of user-defined goals that may also change over time. In comparison to concepts from the state-of-the-art [see, e.g., Augugliaro et al (2013) where trajectories are pre-calculated], the OCbotics approach provides a large step toward applicability in non-lab and unstructured conditions, since it establishes a self-adaptation loop that considers safety constraint and continuously self-optimizes the robot's behavior. We have presented three different projects that operate at different levels of the discussed design concept: web-weaving quad-rotors with an emphasis on optimized local reactive behavior, evolution of collaborative behavior to efficiently work on surfaces, and an immersive user interface for setting and changing user-defined goals.…”

“…They have also been subject to Aerial Robotic Construction (ARC) research (Willmann et al, 2012;Augugliaro et al, 2013) due to their light mass, load-carrying ability, and their ability of connecting large distances. Quad-rotors have been identified as vehicles apt for aerial manipulation mainly due to their robust flight behavior and their hovering capability (Mahony et al, 2012).…”

“…Quad-rotors have been identified as vehicles apt for aerial manipulation mainly due to their robust flight behavior and their hovering capability (Mahony et al, 2012). In Augugliaro et al (2013), prototypic building primitives such as single and multi-round turn hitches, knob and elbow knots as well the trajectories resulting from their concatenation have been discussed. Different from pre-calculating trajectories, we have been working on a self-organizing approach to building tensile structures.…”

An Approach for Movement Coordination of Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Mobile Networks

“…The authors describe their use of prepared rooms with motion capture cameras to provide a precise location services to centrally control the UAVs. This work, which revisits previous studies from Vijay et al [38] in this field, also introduces more advanced approaches to flight control of individual UAVs, enabling quadcopters that have lost one of their propellers to land without problems. For the communication this work also uses IEEE 802.14.5 .…”

“…Of particular interest is their work entitled The Flight Machine Arena [37], which also has some similarities to the work by Vijay et al [38]. The authors describe their use of prepared rooms with motion capture cameras to provide a precise location services to centrally control the UAVs.…”