Passive Compliance Control of Aerial Manipulators

Abstract

This paper presents a passive compliance control for aerial manipulators to achieve stable environmental interactions. The main challenge is the absence of actuation along body-planar directions of the aerial vehicle which might be required during the interaction to preserve passivity. The controller proposed in this paper guarantees passivity of the manipulator through a proper choice of end-effector coordinates, and that of vehicle fuselage is guaranteed by exploiting time domain passivity technique. Simulation studies validate the proposed approach.

The AEROARMS Project: Aerial Robots with Advanced Manipulation Capabilities for Inspection and Maintenance

“…Stability of the coupled controller for an helicopter with a manipulator is proven in [24] for the autonomous scenario. Here, the manipulator wrench forces are computed in the fuselage frame of the helicopter whereby passivity is ensured.…”

Survey on Aerial Manipulator: System, Modeling, and Control

“…44 In addition, helicopters generally fly in an outdoor environment and rarely find application indoors. Yale University, 8,[45][46][47][48][49] German Aerospace Center (DLR), 9,[50][51][52][53] and Shenyang Institute of Automation (Chinese Academy of Sciences) 28,[54][55][56][57][58][59] have conducted aerial manipulation research based on helicopter platforms.…”

“…This modeling approach is attractive and also popular in motion-restricted research. 40,52,53,68,88,99,100,117,124,126,159,163 The equations in compact matrix form can be written as…”

“…40 A passive compliance control is designed for a helicopter AM system to achieve stable environmental interactions. 52,53 Three new imagebased visual-impedance control laws are proposed allowing physical interaction of a dual-arm AM equipped with a camera and a force/torque sensor. 100 Strategies utilizing velocity of the end effector are employed to deal with uncertainties coupled with the operation mechanism, and the proposed approach is validated with experiments including opening and closing a common drawer.…”

Development of SAM: cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulator

“…In order to explore further capabilities of the aerial manipulation, a 7-DoF torque-controlled KUKA LWR robot was integrated into a UAV [15], [16]. Although 7-DoF robotic arm provides many useful benefits such as redundancy [17], [18] and full task space formulation [19], due to the heavy weight (around 15 kg), the manipulator was mounted on the autonomous middle-scale helicopter system with 3.7-meter diameter rotor blades. However, with such dimensions, approaching to a target object might be hard and not safe in a complex environment.…”