Active Interaction Force Control for Contact-Based Inspection with a Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicle
This work addresses the challenge of using fully actuated aerial vehicles for non-destructive testing in infrastructure inspection, representing an incremental advancement in aerial manipulation.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling aerial vehicles to perform contact-based inspection in unstructured environments by developing active interaction force control and planning methods, achieving successful demonstration of disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and force-controlled interaction in various flight orientations.
This paper presents and validates active interaction force control and planning for fully actuated and omnidirectional aerial manipulation platforms, with the goal of aerial contact inspection in unstructured environments. We present a variable axis-selective impedance control which integrates direct force control for intentional interaction, using feedback from an on-board force sensor. The control approach aims to reject disturbances in free flight, while handling unintentional interaction, and actively controlling desired interaction forces. A fully actuated and omnidirectional tilt-rotor aerial system is used to show capabilities of the control and planning methods. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and force controlled interaction in different flight orientations. The system is validated as a tool for non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure, and statistical results of