Survey on Aerial Manipulator: System, Modeling, and Control

Abstract

SUMMARYThe aerial manipulator is a special and new type of flying robot composed of a rotorcraft unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and a/several manipulator/s. It has gained a lot of attention since its initial appearance in 2010. This is mainly because it enables traditional UAVs to conduct versatile manipulating tasks from air, considerably enriching their applications. In this survey, a complete and systematic review of related research on this topic is conducted. First, various types of structure designs of aerial manipulators are listed out. Subsequently, the modeling and control methods are introduced in detail from the perspective of two types of typical application cases: free-flight and motion-restricted operations. Finally, challenges for future research are presented.

Safe Local Aerial Manipulation for the Installation of Devices on Power Lines: AERIAL-CORE First Year Results and Designs

“…The development of aerial manipulation robots in the last decade [3][4][5] has been motivated by the ability of these platforms to easily and quickly reach high altitude work spaces and conduct diverse operations involving physical interaction with the environment, demonstrating their application in contact-based inspection in chemical plants [6] and bridges [7], the installation of sensor devices [8,9], valve turning [10] and other torsional operations [11]. In this sense, the use of aerial manipulation robots are particularly useful to install devices, such as the ones shown in Figure 1, avoiding risk for human operators while reducing the time required to reach the points of interest.…”

A Novel Aerial Manipulator with Front Cutting Effector: Modeling, Control, and Evaluation

“…e aerial manipulator is a kind of aerial robot that carries special operating tools and interacts with the operating object in the air to complete specific tasks [1]. e contact between the aerial manipulator and the environment combines the maneuverability of traditional work tools with the advantages of aerial robots such as long-range, fast speed, good maneuverability, and vast working space, making the application of aerial robots in modern industries possible [2,3].…”

High-Level Modular Autopilot Solution for Fast Prototyping of Unmanned Aerial Systems

“…The novel branch of Aerial Robotics is pushing forward in this direction, mainly due to its broad range of applications, such as contact inspection, maintenance, and assembling at inaccessible and/or dangerous places. For a detailed literature review on this emerging area, we refer interested readers to cutting-edge projects [1], [2], [3] and its ongoing follow-up in [4] (see survey papers [5], [6]), the overview of aerial manipulation in [7], the applications with multi-joint manipulators in [8], [9], [10] and [11], the self-coordinated approach in [12] and [13], and to the ad-hoc autopilot in [14]. In particular, in [2] we challenged ourselves to complete complex missions outdoors, being the inter-consortium integration and code customisation difficulties found while implementing new complex algorithms the main motivation of this work.…”

“…For the sake of completeness, the pseudocode for the UDP modules is shown as an appendix 6. This assures the possibility of future scalability.…”