Design, modeling, and control of an aerial manipulator for placement and retrieval of sensors in the environment

Abstract

On‐site inspection of large‐scale infrastructure often involves high risks for the operators and high insurance costs. Despite several safety measures already in place to avoid accidents, an increasing concern has brought the need to remotely monitor hard‐to‐reach locations, for which the use of aerial robots able to interact with the environment has arisen. In this paper a novel approach to aerial manipulation is presented, where a compact manipulator with a single degree‐of‐freedom is tailored for the placement and retrieval of sensors in the environment. The proposed design integrates on‐board sensing, a high‐performance force controller on the manipulator, and a thrust‐to‐force mapping on the flight controller. Experimental results demonstrate the high reliability achieved during both placement and retrieval tasks on flat surfaces (e.g., a bridge wall) and cylindrical surfaces (e.g., tree trunks). A total number of 89 flight experiments were carried out to demonstrate the robustness and potential of the compact, bespoke aerial design.

Adopting Physical Artificial Intelligence in Soft Aerial Robots

“…Beyond perching, other desired aerial manipulation tasks include handling, sampling, transporting, and interacting with the environment [126][127][128]. Currently, this field is dominated by the use of rigid robot arms, single-DOF [129], multi-jointed [130,131], or even multi-armed systems [132] that hang from the base of these multi-rotor systems. For these systems, questions still remain about their operational capabilities in cluttered and unstructured environments.…”

Mobile Manipulation Hackathon: Moving into Real World Applications

“…The mobility of these systems can take multiple forms depending on the environment: air/space (drones, planes, helicopters, and satellites), water (ships and submarines), and land (wheeled and legged robots). In air and space, mobile manipulation systems often take the shape of aerial vehicles carrying some sort of manipulator [15], [16], e.g., grippers [17] and multilink arms [18], [19] attached to a rotorcraft; they may also be built as manipulators endowed with some flying mechanism, e.g., rotors [20]. A significant challenge for these systems is to maintain flight stability during object manipulation, which limits the range of operations that can be performed.…”

Review of Aerial Manipulator and its Control

“…1 shows some example scenarios where integrated management systems can be used, including the insulation of wind turbine blade cracks, the cleaning of plugged thermocouples on industrial chimneys and bridges. Contact inspection with dams, placement, and recovery of smart sensors in large areas and infrastructure [6]. In [7] introduced the design, development, and prototype development of a new type of aerial interception manipulator, which is composed of a single degree of freedom (DoF) manipulator and a passive basket end effector.…”