An Omnidirectional Aerial Manipulation Platform for Contact-Based Inspection

Abstract

This paper presents an omnidirectional aerial manipulation platform for robust and responsive interaction with unstructured environments, toward the goal of contact-based inspection. The fully actuated tilt-rotor aerial system is equipped with a rigidly mounted end-effector, and is able to exert a 6 degree of freedom force and torque, decoupling the system's translational and rotational dynamics, and enabling precise interaction with the environment while maintaining stability. An impedance controller with selective apparent inertia is formulated to permit compliance in certain degrees of freedom while achieving precise trajectory tracking and disturbance rejection in others. Experiments demonstrate disturbance rejection, push-and-slide interaction, and on-board state estimation with depth servoing to interact with local surfaces. The system is also validated as a tool for contact-based non-destructive testing of concrete infrastructure.

arXiv commentAccepted submission to Robotics: Science and Systems conference 2019. 9 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Towards Efficient Full Pose Omnidirectionality with Overactuated MAVs

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Active Interaction Force Control for Contact-Based Inspection with a Fully Actuated Aerial Vehicle
• Design and optimal control of a tiltrotor micro aerial vehicle for efficient omnidirectional flight
• Feedback Linearization for Quadrotors with a Learned Acceleration Error Model
• Static-Equilibrium Oriented Interaction Force Modeling and Control of Aerial Manipulation with Uni-Directional Thrust Multirotors