Whole-body aerial manipulation by transformable multirotor with two-dimensional multilinks

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the achievement of the aerial manipulation by using the whole body of a transformable aerial robot, instead of attaching an additional manipulator. The aerial robot in our work is composed by two-dimensional multilinks which enable a stable aerial transformation and can be employed as an entire gripper. We propose a planning method to find the optimized grasping form for the multilinks while they are on the air, which is based on the original planar enveloping algorithm, along with the optimization of the internal force and joint torque for the force-closure. We then propose the aerial approach and grasp motion strategy, which is devoted to the determination of the form and position of the aerial robot to approach and grasp effectively the object from the air. Finally we present the experimental results of the aerial manipulation which involves grasping, carrying and dropping different types of object. These results validate the performance of aerial grasping based on our proposed whole-body grasp planning and motion control method.