Mechatronic design of a robotic manipulator for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The paper focuses on the mechatronic design of a robotic manipulator that is meant to be mounted on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and to be used in industrial applications, for both aerial inspection by contact and aerial manipulation. The combination of an UAV and the robotic manipulator realizes the aerial manipulator. The robotic manipulator is designed to be versatile so that the aerial manipulator can perform both trajectory tracking in free flight and physical interaction. Moreover, the robotic manipulator can be mounted on commercially available UAVs a modular way without interfering with the existing onboard control architecture. Experimental test are validating the overall mechatronic design.

[1]  Lorenzo Marconi,et al.  Modeling and control of a flying robot for contact inspection , 2012, 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[2]  Lorenzo Marconi,et al.  Developing an Aerial Manipulator Prototype: Physical Interaction with the Environment , 2014, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[3]  Konstantin Kondak,et al.  First analysis and experiments in aerial manipulation using fully actuated redundant robot arm , 2013, 2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[4]  Aaron M. Dollar,et al.  Grasping from the air: Hovering capture and load stability , 2011, 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[5]  Stefano Stramigioli,et al.  Mechanical design of a manipulation system for unmanned aerial vehicles , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[6]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Cooperative manipulation and transportation with aerial robots , 2009, Auton. Robots.

[7]  P. Chiacchio,et al.  Aerial service robotics: The AIRobots perspective , 2012, 2012 2nd International Conference on Applied Robotics for the Power Industry (CARPI).

[8]  Albert Albers,et al.  Semi-autonomous flying robot for physical interaction with environment , 2010, 2010 IEEE Conference on Robotics, Automation and Mechatronics.

[9]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Construction of Cubic Structures with Quadrotor Teams , 2011, Robotics: Science and Systems.

[10]  Aaron M. Dollar,et al.  UAV rotorcraft in compliant contact: Stability analysis and simulation , 2011, 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.