Localization and grasping of small load carriers with autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

The application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the area of inspection, survey or urban logistics has become a rapidly developing research domain. While the feasibility of material transports with UAVs has already been shown in the scope of different projects, the payload is thereby usually transferred manually into the UAV's load handling device. A decisive factor for the economic usability of UAVs for aerial transportation, however, is a fully automated system including the autonomous recognition and pick-up of the cargo. We therefore present a solution for the automated detection, localization and grasping of small load carriers with UAVs. The system includes a specialized load handing device, a camera-based real-time tracking solution for small load carriers and a fusion of the global and relative position measurements to achieve the in-flight positioning accuracy required for the autonomous cargo pick-up.

Aerial Grasping and Transport Using an Unmanned Aircraft (UA) Equipped with an Industrial Suction Gripper

“…The methodology used to fuse UWB tracking data and optical positioning information, an evaluation of the achieved in-flight positioning accuracy as well as the general system architecture used for object interaction with UA is presented in [15]. Thereby it has been shown, that the positioning accuracy based on UWB and additional optical tracking information is sufficient for grasping objects with lateral dimensions of 10 cm x 10 cm or more.…”