Toward Autonomous Rotation-Aware Unmanned Aerial Grasping
This addresses the problem of enabling more capable autonomous aerial manipulation for applications like inspection or delivery, though it appears incremental with specific hardware and method improvements.
The paper tackles autonomous aerial grasping by developing a vision-based unmanned aerial manipulator with a 3DoF robotic arm, achieving rotation-aware grasping in GPS-denied environments through a novel detection method called Rotation-SqueezeDet that provides target position and rotation angle in near real-time on Jetson TX2.
Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Manipulators (UAMs) have shown promising potentials to transform passive sensing missions into active 3-dimension interactive missions, but they still suffer from some difficulties impeding their wide applications, such as target detection and stabilization. This letter presents a vision-based autonomous UAM with a 3DoF robotic arm for rotational grasping, with a compensation on displacement for center of gravity. First, the hardware, software architecture and state estimation methods are detailed. All the mechanical designs are fully provided as open-source hardware for the reuse by the community. Then, we analyze the flow distribution generated by rotors and plan the robotic arm's motion based on this analysis. Next, a novel detection approach called Rotation-SqueezeDet is proposed to enable rotation-aware grasping, which can give the target position and rotation angle in near real-time on Jetson TX2. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is validated in multiple experimental trials, highlighting it's applicability of autonomous aerial grasping in GPS-denied environments.