An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection
This addresses the challenge of contact-based inspection for infrastructure maintenance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing aerial manipulation methods with specific control improvements.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling aerial robots to perform contact-based inspection in unstructured environments by developing an omnidirectional aerial manipulation platform that can exert 6-DOF force and torque, achieving precise interaction and stability as demonstrated in experiments for tasks like push-and-slide and non-destructive testing of concrete.
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 freedom while achieving precise trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection in others. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and on-board state estimation with depth servoing to interact with local surfaces. The system is also validated as a tool for contact-based non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure.