Design and Control of a Hexacopter With Soft Grasper for Autonomous Object Detection and Grasping

Abstract

In this paper, an image based visual servo (IBVS) scheme is developed for a hexacopter, equipped with a robotic soft grasper to perform autonomous object detection and grasping. The structural design of the hexacopter-soft grasper system is analyzed to study the soft grasper’s influence on the multirotor’s aerodynamics. The object detection, tracking and trajectory planning are implemented on a high-level computer which sends position and velocity setpoints to the flight controller. A soft robotic grasper is mounted on the UAV to enable the collection of various contaminants. The use of soft robotics removes excess weight associated with traditional rigid graspers, as well as simplifies the controls of the grasping mechanics. Collected experimental results demonstrate autonomous object detection, tracking and grasping. This pipeline would enable the system to autonomously collect solid and liquid contaminants in water canal based on GPS and multi-camera system. It can also be used for more complex aerial manipulation including in-flight grasping.

Design and Control of SQUEEZE: A Spring-augmented QUadrotor for intEractions with the Environment to squeeZE-and-fly

“…velocity of the vehicle in the inertial frame J ∈ R 3×3 moment of inertia matrix in the body fixed frame Ω ∈ R 3 angular velocity in the body frame R ∈ SO (3) rotation matrix from body frame to the inertial frame cg ∈ R 3 position of center of gravity of vehicle in the {q 1 , q 2 , q 3 } frame…”

“…angles made by arms 2 and 4 respectively with the negative q 1 axis f ∈ R control input of total thrust τ ∈ R 3 control moments for roll, pitch and yaw γ ∈ R 4 angles made by each arm with q 2 axis r ∈ R 4 distance from each m to the CG h ∈ R height of motor pairs 2 and 4 in…”

“…Recent work on quadrotor systems demonstrate their applications for challenging tasks such as inspections of cluttered and occluded environments [1], [2], aerial grasping [3] and contact-based navigation, where a quadrotor interacts physically with the environment while navigating through it [4]- [7]. Flying through such cluttered environments often requires the quadrotor to traverse through gaps smaller than its size, while simultaneously ensuring successful missions.…”

Towards reconfigurable and flexible multirotors

“…Besides ensuring task accomplishment safely, UAVs should also exhibit multiple functionalities such as object manipulation and locomotion on land/water to widen the scope of their applications. Traditional methods to achieve this include augmented subsystems such as external robotic arms, grippers and wheels or employing collaborative UAVs (Mulgaonkaret al 2016;Mishra et al 2018;Kalantari and Spenko 2014;Vincent and Rubin 2004;Murphy et al 2008). However, low flight times due to decreased power-to-weight ratios and communication issues for synergic motion planning are still open research areas (Chung et al 2018).…”

Collision Recovery Control of a Foldable Quadrotor

“…Quadrotor systems are found in a multitude of applications like aerial photography, package delivery, surveillance, search and rescue missions, and aerial manipulation tasks [1,2]. In such missions, a quadrotor is often required to fly through cluttered environments.…”