Air-arm: A new kind of flying manipulator

Abstract

We introduce a new kind of aerial manipulator based on multirotors. This device exploits the rarely used yaw movement which characterizes these aircrafts in order to generate and transmit forces and displacements trough a serial-chain of rigid links and other drones, as if the whole system was a flying robot arm with UAVS as rotational joints. Also we provide comparisons with the existing technologies and a condensed review concerning them. Finally, this paper proposes many open problems in order to develop the final system. Due to the scientific and social impact of this new approach, we provide some application examples.

Methods for Autonomous Wristband Placement with a Search-and-Rescue Aerial Manipulator

“…An aerial manipulator combines the advantages of UAVs with the versatility of manipulators as a single device. They range from conventional serial manipulators [11] to parallel manipulators (as in Figure 1) which take advantage of limited center of mass displacements [12] and even with the combination of multiple multi-rotors [13] for increased manipulability. The compliant interaction with the environment in aerial manipulators is a current research topic, not only with single [14] but also with dual arms [15], [16] manipulators for autonomous human interaction SAR must solve the problems of the intelligent perception and safe actuation, keeping the humans -and their limbs -away from the propellers of the aerial platform.…”

Dynamic Stability and Control of a Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

“…Earlier studies focused on the installation of a lightweight gripper at the belly of the aircraft [3][4][5]. The gripper has less impact on the UAV, but the operating ability is very limited, so the later research mainly focused on changing the gripper device into a manipulator [6][7][8][9]. Manipulator, especially redundant manipulator, has flexible operation [10,11].…”

Modelling and control of helicopter robotic landing gear for uneven ground conditions

“…Examples are also found in the field of Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (MM-UAV), a recent research line that consists on attaching one or several robot-arms to the body of a rotorcraft in order to interact with the environment and perform manipulation tasks [8], [9], [10].…”