Aerial Mobile Manipulator System to Enable Dexterous Manipulations with Increased Precision
This addresses the problem of precise manipulation for aerial robotics applications, but appears incremental as it builds on existing AMM concepts with specific hardware integration.
The paper tackles the challenge of dynamic coordination between a UAV and an on-board manipulator in aerial mobile manipulators to enable dexterous manipulation with high precision, presenting a system that uses a fully-actuated UAV and an on-board manipulator, with experimental results showing position keeping under disturbances and preliminary simulation results for end-point tracking.
Problems associated with physical interactions using aerial mobile manipulators (AMM) are being independently addressed with respect to mobility and manipulability. Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are a common choice for mobility while on-board manipulators are increasingly be used for manipulability. However, the dynamic coordination between the UAV and on-board manipulator remains a significant obstacle to enable dexterous manipulation with high precision. This paper presents an AMM system configuration to addresses both the mobility and manipulability issues together. A fully-actuated UAV is chosen to achieve dexterous aerial mobile manipulation, but is limited by the actuation range of the UAV. An on-board manipulator is employed to enhance the performance in terms of dexterity and precision at the end-effector. Experimental results on position keeping of the dexterous hexrotor by withstanding the disturbances caused by the motions of the on-board manipulator and external wind disturbances are presented. Preliminary simulation results on end-point tracking in a simple planar on-board manipulator case is presented.