The aerial manipulator (AM) is a systematic operational robotic platform in high standard on algorithm robustness. Directly deploying the algorithms to the practical system will take numerous trial and error costs and even cause destructive results. In this paper, a new modular simulation platform is designed to evaluate aerial manipulation related algorithms before deploying. In addition, to realize a fully autonomous aerial grasping, a series of algorithm modules consisting a complete workflow are designed and integrated in the simulation platform, including perception, planning and control modules. This framework empowers the AM to autonomously grasp remote targets without colliding with surrounding obstacles relying only on on-board sensors. Benefiting from its modular design, this software architecture can be easily extended with additional algorithms. Finally, several simulations are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
Aerial manipulation aims at combining the manoeuvrability of aerial vehicles with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This, however, comes at the cost of the additional control complexity due to the coupling of the dynamics of the two systems. In this paper we present a NMPC specifically designed for MAVs equipped with a robotic arm. We formulate a hybrid control model for the combined MAV-arm system which incorporates interaction forces acting on the end effector. We explain the practical implementation of our algorithm and show extensive experimental results of our custom built sy…
AeRSoM: An Aerial Rigid-Soft Integrated Manipulator for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Hunan University（湖南大学）；National Engineering Research Center for Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology（国家机器人视觉感知与控制技术工程研究中心）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Most aerial manipulators use serial rigid-link designs, which results in large forces when initiating contacts during manipulation and could cause flight stability difficulty. This limitation could potentially be improved by the compliance of continuum manipulators. To achieve this goal, we present the novel design of a compact, lightweight, and modular cable-driven continuum manipulator for aerial drones. We then derive a complete modeling framework for its kinematics, statics, and stiffness (compliance). The framework is essential for integrating the manipulator to aerial drones. Finally, we…
New Jersey Institute of Technology（新泽西理工学院）；University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAVs) are attaining more and more maneuverability and sensory ability as a promising teleoperation platform for intelligent interaction with the environments. This work presents a novel 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cyber-physical system for aerial manipulation. This UAV's body is capable of exerting powerful propulsion force in the longitudinal direction, decoupling the translational dynamics and the rotational dynamics on the longitudinal plane. A high-level impedance control law is proposed to drive the vehicle for trajectory tracking and i…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究所）
Drone application for aerial manipulation is tested in such areas as industrial maintenance, supporting the rescuers in emergencies, and e-commerce. Most of such applications require teleoperation. The operator receives visual feedback from the camera installed on a robot arm or drone. As aerial manipulation requires delicate and precise motion of robot arm, the camera data delay, narrow field of view, and blurred images caused by drone dynamics can lead the UAV to crash. The paper focuses on the development of a novel teleoperation system for aerial manipulation using Virtual Reality (VR). Th…
Integration of a Variable Stiffness Link for Long-Reach Aerial Manipulation
Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering Control, Robotics and Embodied AI, Technical University of Denmark（技术大学丹麦分校电气与光子工程系）；GRVC Robotics Laboratory, Universidad de Sevilla（塞维利亚大学GRVC机器人实验室）
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 free…
Multilinked aerial robot is one of the state-of-the-art works in aerial robotics, which demonstrates the deformability benefiting both maneuvering and manipulation. However, the performance in outdoor physical world has not yet been evaluated because of the weakness in the controllability and the lack of the state estimation for autonomous flight. Thus we adopt tilting propellers to enhance the controllability. The related design, modeling and control method are developed in this work to enable the stable hovering and deformation. Furthermore, the state estimation which involves the time synch…
This report proposes a combined optimal control and perception framework for Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) autonomous navigation in novel indoor enclosed environments, relying exclusively on on-board sensor data. We use privileged information from a simulator to generate optimal waypoints in 3D space that our perception system learns to imitate. The trained learning based perception module in turn is able to generate similar obstacle avoiding waypoints from sensor data (RGB + IMU) alone. We demonstrate the efficacy of the framework across novel scenes in the iGibson simulation environment.
Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学电气与计算机工程学院）
This paper presents a method for aerial manipulator end-effector trajectory tracking by encompassing dynamics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and null space of the manipulator attached to it in the motion planning procedure. The proposed method runs in phases. Trajectory planning starts by not accounting for roll and pitch angles of the underactuated UAV system. Next, we propose simulating the dynamics on such a trajectory and obtaining UAV attitude through the model. The full aerial manipulator state obtained in such a manner is further utilized to account for discrepancies in planned an…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）
This letter describes a method for autonomous aerial cinematography with distributed lighting by a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Although camera-carrying multi-rotor helicopters have become commonplace in cinematography, their usage is limited to scenarios with sufficient natural light or of lighting provided by static artificial lights. We propose to use a formation of unmanned aerial vehicles as a tool for filming a target under illumination from various directions, which is one of the fundamental techniques of traditional cinematography. We decompose the multi-UAV trajectory opti…
Modular Adaptive Aerial Manipulation under Unknown Dynamic Coupling Forces
The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）；International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad（海德拉巴国际信息技术学院）；Southeast University（东南大学）
A Precise Real-Time Force-Aware Grasping System for Robust Aerial Manipulation
State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学工业控制技术状态重点实验室）；Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；State Key Laboratory of Fluid Power and Mechatronic Systems, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学流体动力与机械系统状态重点实验室）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Additive Manufacturing Technology and Equipment, School of Mechanical Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江省增材制造技术与装备重点实验室）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huzhou Institute, Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
Terrestrial-aerial bimodal vehicles bloom in both academia and industry because they incorporate both the high mobility of aerial vehicles and the long endurance of ground vehicles. In this work, we present an autonomous and adaptive navigation framework to bring complete autonomy to this class of vehicles. The framework mainly includes 1) a hierarchical motion planner that generates safe and low-power terrestrial-aerial trajectories in unknown environments and 2) a unified motion controller which dynamically adjusts energy consumption in terrestrial locomotion. Extensive real-world experiment…
AIR-VLA: Vision-Language-Action Systems for Aerial Manipulation
The Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）；School of Information and Intelligent Engineering, University of Sanya（三亚大学信息与智能工程学院）；School of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University（湖南大学机械与车辆工程学院）；State Key Lab of Intelligent Transportation Systems, School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学交通科学与工程学院）
Learning Cross-Coupled and Regime Dependent Dynamics for Aerial Manipulation
Department of Computer Science, The University of Manchaster（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）；International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息科技研究所）；Department of Cognitive Robotics, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学认知机器人系）；Newcastle University（新castle大学）
AIR-VLA+: Decoupling Movement and Manipulation via Cascaded Dual-Action Decoders with Asymmetric MoE for Aerial Robots
The Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学自动化学院）；College of Automotive and Energy Engineering, Tongji University（同济大学汽车与能源工程学院）；School of Transportation Science and Engineering, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学交通科学与工程学院）；Information Science, East China Normal University（华东师范大学信息科学）
Whole-body motion planning and safety-critical control for aerial manipulation
School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore（机械与航空航天工程学院，南洋理工大学，新加坡）；Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, South Korea（航空航天工程系，首尔国立大学，韩国）
Queensland University of Technology（昆士兰科技大学）；Australian Centre for Robotic Vision（澳大利亚机器人视觉中心）
This paper presents the design and implementation of an assisted control technology for a small multirotor platform for aerial inspection of fixed energy infrastructure. Sensor placement is supported by a theoretical analysis of expected sensor performance and constrained platform behaviour to speed up implementation. The optical sensors provide relative position information between the platform and the asset, which enables human operator inputs to be autonomously adjusted to ensure safe separation. The assisted control approach is designed to reduced operator workload during close proximity i…
Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程与技术研究院）；Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University（浙江大学湖州研究院）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Designing autonomous aerial robot team systems remains a grand challenge in robotics. Existing works in this field can be categorized as centralized and decentralized. Centralized methods suffer from scale dilemmas, while decentralized ones often lead to poor planning quality. In this paper, we propose an enhanced decentralized autonomous aerial robot team system with group planning. According to the spatial distribution of agents, the system dynamically divides the team into several groups and isolated agents. For conflicts within each group, we propose a novel coordination mechanism named gr…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Robert Bosch Center for Cyber-Physical Systems（罗伯特·博世网络物理系统中心）
Selective interception of objects in unknown environment autonomously by UAVs is an interesting problem. In this work, vision based interception is carried out. This problem is a part of challenge 1 of Mohammed Bin Zayed International Robotic Challenge, 2020, where, balloons are kept at five random locations for the UAVs to autonomously explore, detect, approach and intercept. The problem requires a different formulation to execute compared to the normal interception problems in literature. This work details the different aspect of this problem from vision to manipulator design. The frame work…
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；SDU UAS（南丹麦大学无人机系统中心）；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）
In this paper, we present an online planning-scheduling approach for battery-powered autonomous aerial robots. The approach consists of simultaneously planning a coverage path and scheduling onboard computational tasks. We further derive a novel variable coverage motion robust to airborne constraints and an empirically motivated energy model. The model includes the energy contribution of the schedule based on an automatic computational energy modeling tool. Our experiments show how an initial flight plan is adjusted online as a function of the available battery, accounting for uncertainty. Our…
FlyAware: Inertia-Aware Aerial Manipulation via Vision-Based Estimation and Post-Grasp Adaptation
School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学智能系统工程学院）；Visual Intelligence Lab, Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学成卡顺机器人研究所视觉智能实验室）；Differential Robotics Technology Company, Ltd.（差分机器人技术有限公司）
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（美国国家航空航天局喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院）；Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology（机器人与智能机器研究所，佐治亚理工学院）
Hybrid ground and aerial vehicles can possess distinct advantages over ground-only or flight-only designs in terms of energy savings and increased mobility. In this work we outline our unified framework for controls, planning, and autonomy of hybrid ground/air vehicles. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) We develop a control scheme for the control of passive two-wheeled hybrid ground/aerial vehicles. 2) We present a unified planner for both rolling and flying by leveraging differential flatness mappings. 3) We conduct experiments leveraging mapping and global planning for hybrid mobility in un…
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The proposed aerial inspection system reaches high level of autonomy on a large scale, while pushing to the boundaries the real life deployment of aerial robotics. In the presented approach, the MAVs deployed for the inspection of the structure rely only on their onboard computer and sensory systems. The developed framework envisions a modular system, combining …
Learning Swing-up Maneuvers for a Suspended Aerial Manipulation Platform in a Hierarchical Control Framework
Automation and Control Institute (ACIN), TU Wien（自动化与控制研究所（ACIN）、维也纳技术大学）；Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) GmbH（奥地利技术研究所（AIT） GmbH）；Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR)（机器人与机电研究所、德国航天中心（DLR））
Safety-Critical Bilateral Teleoperation for Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Using Force-Sensorless Haptic Feedback
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；Automation and System Research Institute (ASRI)（自动化与系统研究所）；Institute of Advanced Aerospace Technology (IAAT)（先进航空航天技术研究所）
AM-Bench: A Modular Simulation Suite and Benchmark for Aerial Manipulation Policy Learning
The Robotics Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学计算机学院机器人研究所）；Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学航空航天工程系）；School of Mechanical Engineering, Kyung Hee University（庆熙大学机械工程学院）
