Aerial Manipulation

Fitting a flying platform such as a drone with an arm or gripper so it can physically contact objects in the air.

This field combines a flying platform's mobility with a robot arm's manipulation ability. The common form is a multirotor drone carrying one or more arms or grippers, though helicopters and dedicated platforms able to produce thrust in multiple directions also exist. Unlike an ordinary drone used only for photography or mapping, this kind of system must grasp, press, plug in, unplug, or perform contact-based inspection while hovering or flying. The difficulty is that the arm's motion and contact forces disturb the aircraft's own attitude in turn, so flight and manipulation must be modeled and controlled together, all while payload and flight time remain tightly limited. The EU's AEROARMS project (2015–2019, led by Anibal Ollero's group at the University of Seville) built drones with multiple arms for inspecting and maintaining industrial facilities such as oil refineries.

ExampleThe AEROARMS project's multi-arm drone completed its final review demonstration at a refinery in Germany, flying up to pipes at height to perform contact-based inspection in place of a worker climbing up.

Related

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) · Mobile Manipulation · Contact-rich Manipulation · Inspection Robot · Aerial Vision-and-Language Navigation · Whole-Body Control

Sources

Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review (Ruggiero, Lippiello, Ollero, IEEE RA-L 2018)
Past, Present, and Future of Aerial Robotic Manipulators (Ollero et al., IEEE T-RO)
AEROARMS project