Whole-Body Bilateral Teleoperation of a Redundant Aerial Manipulator
This work addresses teleoperation challenges for aerial manipulators, enabling more effective human-controlled manipulation in remote or hazardous environments, but it is incremental as it builds on existing teleoperation and null-space control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of bilateral teleoperation for a redundant aerial manipulator, where moving the camera attached to the flying base can disturb end-effector motion, and presents a novel haptic concept called Null-Space Wall and a stable teleoperation framework, with numerical simulations confirming the system's ability to maintain passivity and allow optimal base positioning.
Attaching a robotic manipulator to a flying base allows for significant improvements in the reachability and versatility of manipulation tasks. In order to explore such systems while taking advantage of human capabilities in terms of perception and cognition, bilateral teleoperation arises as a reasonable solution. However, since most telemanipulation tasks require visual feedback in addition to the haptic one, real-time (task-dependent) positioning of a video camera, which is usually attached to the flying base, becomes an additional objective to be fulfilled. Since the flying base is part of the kinematic structure of the robot, if proper care is not taken, moving the video camera could undesirably disturb the end-effector motion. For that reason, the necessity of controlling the base position in the null space of the manipulation task arises. In order to provide the operator with meaningful information about the limits of the allowed motions in the null space, this paper presents a novel haptic concept called Null-Space Wall. In addition, a framework to allow stable bilateral teleoperation of both tasks is presented. Numerical simulation data confirm that the proposed framework is able to keep the system passive while allowing the operator to perform time-delayed telemanipulation and command the base to a task-dependent optimal pose.