Visual-Inertial Telepresence for Aerial Manipulation
This addresses the challenge of precise remote control for aerial manipulation, which is incremental as it builds on existing telepresence and tracking methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities by developing a telepresence system that provides real-time 3D visual feedback to a remote operator, achieving successful tasks like grasping and peg-in-hole insertion in both indoor and outdoor experiments.
This paper presents a novel telepresence system for enhancing aerial manipulation capabilities. It involves not only a haptic device, but also a virtual reality that provides a 3D visual feedback to a remotely-located teleoperator in real-time. We achieve this by utilizing onboard visual and inertial sensors, an object tracking algorithm and a pre-generated object database. As the virtual reality has to closely match the real remote scene, we propose an extension of a marker tracking algorithm with visual-inertial odometry. Both indoor and outdoor experiments show benefits of our proposed system in achieving advanced aerial manipulation tasks, namely grasping, placing, force exertion and peg-in-hole insertion.