Design Iterations for Passive Aerial Manipulator
This addresses the challenge of target interception for drone-based applications, but it appears incremental as it focuses on design improvements rather than a breakthrough.
The paper tackled the problem of grabbing maneuvering targets using drones by designing a novel aerial manipulator with a passive basket-type end-effector and an in-flight extending propeller guard, resulting in an energy-efficient and lightweight prototype suitable for aerial grabbing applications.
Grabbing a manoeuvring target using drones is a challenging problem. This paper presents the design, development, and prototyping of a novel aerial manipulator for target interception. It is a single Degree of Freedom (DoF) manipulator with passive basket-type end-effector. The proposed design is energy efficient, light weight and suitable for aerial grabbing applications. The detailed design of the proposed manipulation mechanism and a novel in-flight extending propeller guard, is reported in this paper.