This paper summarizes new aerial robotic manipulation technologies and methods, required for outdoor industrial inspection and maintenance, developed in the AEROARMS project. It presents aerial robotic manipulators with dual arms and multi-directional thrusters. It deals with the control systems, including the control of the interaction forces and the compliance, the teleoperation, which uses passivity to tackle the tradeoff between stability and performance, perception methods for localization, mapping and inspection, and planning methods, including a new control-aware approach for aerial manipulation. Finally, it describes a novel industrial platform with multidirectional thrusters and a new arm design to increase the robustness in industrial contact inspections. The lessons learned in the application to outdoor aerial manipulation for inspection and maintenance are pointed out.

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Navigation and exploration in 3D environments is still a challenging task for autonomous robots that move on the ground. Robots for Search and Rescue missions must deal with unstructured and very complex scenarios. This paper presents a path planning system for navigation and exploration of ground robots in such situations. We use (unordered) point clouds as the main sensory input without building any explicit representation of the environment from them. These 3D points are employed as space samples by an Optimal-RRTplanner (RRT * ) to compute safe and efficient paths. The use of an objective function for path construction and the natural exploratory behaviour of the RRT * planner make it appropriate for the tasks. The approach is evaluated in different simulations showing the viability of autonomous navigation and exploration in complex 3D scenarios.