Behavioral control of unmanned aerial vehicle manipulator systems

Abstract

In this paper a behavioral control framework is developed to control an unmanned aerial vehicle-manipulator (UAVM) system, composed by a multirotor aerial vehicle equipped with a robotic arm. The goal is to ensure vehicle-arm coordination and manage complex multi-task missions, where different behaviors must be encompassed in a clear and meaningful way. In detail, a control scheme, based on the null space-based behavioral paradigm, is proposed to handle the coordination between the arm and vehicle motion. To this aim, a set of basic functionalities (elementary behaviors) are designed and combined in a given priority order, in order to attain more complex tasks (compound behaviors). A supervisor is in charge of switching between the compound behaviors according to the mission needs and the sensory feedback. The method is validated on a real testbed, consisting of a multirotor aircraft with an attached 6 Degree of Freedoms manipulator, developed within the EU-funded project ARCAS (Aerial Robotics Cooperative Assembly System). At the the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that an UAVM system is experimentally tested in the execution of complex multi-task missions. The results show that, by properly designing a set of compound behaviors and a supervisor, vehicle-arm coordination in complex missions can be effectively managed

Coordinated Control of Aerial Robotic Manipulators: Theory and Experiments

“…whereṗ E and ω E are the linear and angular velocities, after some algebraic steps, that can be found in [4], is given by…”

“…Design and control od aerial manipulators are handled in [2], where the design, modeling and control of a quadrotor helicopter endowed with a 3-DOFs delta structure and a 3-DOFs end-effector, is proposed, or in [3] where a quadrotor vehicle with a 2-DOFs manipulator is adopted for an experimental validation of an adaptive control. In [4] a behavioral control for a multi-rotor vehicle with a 6-DOFs arm is presented and experimentally validated.…”

“…At our best knowledge, this is the first time that a complete control framework for coordinated motion control of multiple aerial robots has been proposed and experimentally tested. A coordinated motion control framework for a single UAVM is presented in [4], where a preliminary version of the two lowest layers used in this paper is developed. In [13], the coordinated control for multiple UAVMs has been sketched, while in this paper the design of the local supervisor is formalized and more technical details, regarding, e.g, the smooth transition Preprint version of the paper: G. Muscio © © 2018 IEEE.…”

Control-Aware Motion Planning for Task-Constrained Aerial Manipulation

“…This approach is particularly suited to handle redundant systems and thus to assign multiple control objectives beyond the sole arm's end-effector, e.g., obstacle avoidance or mechanical joint limits, etc. Assigning a relative priority leads to what is known as task-priority inverse kinematics, which has been successfully implemented for aerial manipulation [6]. Such methods apply null-space-based behavioral control [7].…”

“…Figure 1 shows an example where an aerial manipulator has to inspect the surface of a pipe. To accomplish this type of task, one of the possible methods is based on inverse kinematics control [6]. If the system is over-actuated with respect to (w.r.t.)…”