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

Abstract

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.

Hierarchical nonlinear control for multi-rotor asymptotic stabilization based on zero-moment direction

“…Proof. Since in Z 0 we have e t = 0 and f ∆ = 0, then from (27) it follows that d * f = mgR (q d )e 3 . Taking norm on both sides and due to the property of rotation matrices, it holds that |f | = mg.…”

“…Instead of describing the error system in terms of the deviation f − mg (which should clearly go to zero), we prefer to use the redundant set of coordinates f ∆ in (27). Indeed, according to (27), showing that f ∆ tends to zero implies that, asymptotically, we get R(q d )d * f = f r . Namely, as long as e t tends to zero too, we approach the set where d * f = mgR (q d )e 3 .…”

“…In the last years, technological advances in miniaturized sensors/actuators and optimized data processing have lead to extensive use of small autonomous flying vehicles within the academic, military, and (more recently) commercial contexts (see [11,32,34] and references therein). Thanks to their high maneuverability and versatility, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are rapidly increasing in popularity, thus becoming a mature technology in several application fields ranging from the classical visual sensing tasks (e.g., surveillance and aerial photography [17,26] to the recent environment exploration and physical interaction (e.g., search and rescue operations, grasping and manipulation [14,21,27,29,33]).…”

An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection

“…While the platform demonstrates a high down-force, lateral and upward force exertion are limited due to the internal forces needed for omnidirectionality. Recent publications have demonstrated push-and-slide interaction and disturbance rejection, as well as various industrial applications [12,19,20,11]. Our approach combines omnidirectionality with high force and torque capabilities to eliminate the need for an actuated manipulator arm.…”

Development of SAM: cable-Suspended Aerial Manipulator

“…From previous research [23], [24], it has been shown that by installing propulsion units in the special arrangement (not collinear), an omnidirectional 6 DoF wrench can be realized 2 . More specifically, the body wrench w and the thrust input vector u can be related by allocation matrix 2 It would be worthwhile to mention that, the minimum required number of propulsion units to realize 6 DoF wrench equals 7. We decided to use 8 units in order to address the exploitation of redundancy in the future studies.…”