Aerial Service Robots: An overview of the AIRobots activity

Abstract

This video paper outlines some of the results achieved during the first two years of the ongoing European project AIRobots (Innovative Aerial Service Robots for Remote Inspection by Contact, www.airobots.eu). Goal of AIRobots is to develop a new generation of aerial service robots capable of supporting human beings in all those activities that require the ability to interact actively and safely with environments not constrained on ground but, indeed, airborne. The flight tests presented in the video show the capabilities of the prototypes developed in the project to accomplish tasks including 3D environmental reconstruction using stereo vision, obstacle avoidance and remote manipulation by means of an onboard robotic arm.

Closed-form solution for absolute scale velocity estimation using visual and inertial data with a sliding least-squares estimation

“…Thanks to the achieved results, a new generation of aerial service robots [1], [2] are becoming effective also for interaction tasks with the environment [3], [4]. The main problem with using vision system is the loss of the depth information of the observed image features.…”

Optimal event handling by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles

“…Whenever m UAVs are required by an event, we assume that the event cannot be serviced until it has been reached by all m UAVs: hence, the waiting time of the event is the traveling time of its m-th closest UAV. To formalize this fact, we shall write m-min S to denote the m-th smallest element in a finite set of real numbers S. With this notation in place, we are ready to define the following integral cost function, which represents the expected service time of an event, (1) and the corresponding optimization problem min p∈Ω n J exp (p). In the special case when M = 1, this cost reduces to Ω min i∈{1,...,n}…”

“…Thanks to their flexibility, fleets of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are starting to be used for surveillance, inspection [1], search-and-rescue missions [2], and in agriculture [3]. In these application scenarios, the fleet of UAVs is responsible for a certain environment where events can randomly occur and the UAVs should be positioned so to guarantee an optimal coverage of the environment according to the probability of the events.…”

Development of an unmanned helicopter automatic barrels transportation system

“…The original purpose of such a combination was to extend the mission domains of UAVs from reconnaissance and surveillance to the interaction with the environment. Since vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAVs are much more flexible and more suitable for such kind of aerial manipulation operations, the popularly developed aerial manipulation test platforms all belong to the VTOL UAVs' category such as unmanned quadrotor [1], [2], [3], ducted-fan UAV [4], [14], and unmanned helicopter (UH) [5], [10], [11].…”

“…Since ducted-fan UAVs' rotor was inside the airframe, ducted-fan UAV was supposed to be relatively safer compared to the quadrotor. A ductedfan UAV was built up to validate its applications in a service area in which a more strict security should be guaranteed [4]. Since quadrotor and ducted-fan UAVs are relatively small with a limited payload capacity for real operations, they are more suitable for indoor service-oriented applications; yet unmanned helicopter is preferred for real life applications.…”