Cooperative manipulation and transportation with aerial robots

By Nathan Michael, Jonathan R. Fink, Vijay R. Kumar. Auton. Robots, 2009

777 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we consider the problem of controlling multiple robots manipulating and transporting a payload in three dimensions via cables. We develop robot configurations that ensure static equilibrium of the payload at a desired pose while respecting constraints on the tension and provide analysis of payload stability for these configurations. We demonstrate our methods on a team of aerial robots via simulation and experimentation.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Control and Systems Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d4d92534667af8e3ada0c8a6522c137fc2832e13

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

In Control and Systems Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Aerial manipulation using a quadrotor with a two DOF robotic arm (2013, background): “In [8], speciﬁc attitude and position of a payload is achieved using cables connected to three quadrotors.”
Monocular‐SLAM–based navigation for autonomous micro helicopters in GPS‐denied environments (2011, methodology): “…as multiple flips of the MAV (Lupashin, Schöllig , Sherback, & D'Andrea, 2010), docking to an oblique wall (Mellinger, Michael, et al., 2010), or cooperative grasping of objects (Mellinger, Shomin, Michael, & Kumar, 2010; Michael, Fink, & Kumar, 2010) were achieved in 2010 using the Vicon system.”
Opportunities and challenges with autonomous micro aerial vehicles (2012, background): “by other vehicles is possible in different settings ranging from payloads suspended from UAVs [12, 18, 19, 32] to payloads rigidly grasped by UAVs [30].”
Design, modeling, estimation and control for aerial grasping and manipulation (2011, background): “While multiple robots can carry payloads with grippers [15] or with cables [16], their end effectors and grippers have to be light weight themselves and capable of grasping complex shapes.”
A Survey on Aerial Swarm Robotics (2018, background): “In either scenario, the object may be suspended via cables attached to the robots [129]–[133] or may be rigidly attached to the robots [134]–[138].”
Distributed multi-robot collision avoidance via deep reinforcement learning for navigation in complex scenarios (2020, background): “…such as task allocation (Chen and Sun, 2011; Stone and Veloso, 1999), formation control (Balch and Arkin, 1998; Chen et al., 2010; De La Cruz and Carelli, 2008; Sun et al., 2009), and object transportation (Alonso-Mora et al., 2017; Hu and Sun, 2011; Michael et al., 2011; Turpin et al., 2014).”
The Flight Assembled Architecture installation: Cooperative construction with flying machines (2014, background): “Aerial manipulation research is currently addressing many of the open questions on the use of UAVs in scenarios where they must interact with their surroundings [9] and with each other to achieve a task: multiple quadrocopters cooperating to lift a payload are presented, among others, in [10]–[12]; ”
Vision-Controlled Micro Flying Robots: From System Design to Autonomous Navigation and Mapping in GPS-Denied Environments (2014, background): “This capability allows them easily to work in small indoor environments, pass through windows, traverse narrow corridors, and even grasp small objects [1].”
Cooperative Grasping and Transport Using Multiple Quadrotors (2010, background): “The problem of aerial manipulation using cables is analyzed in [1, 2] with the focus on finding robot configurations that ensure static equilibrium of the payload at a desired pose while respecting constraints on the tension.”
Survey on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Networks for Civil Applications: A Communications Viewpoint (2016, methodology): “In domains which may require multiple devices sharing load or performing tightly synchronized tasks, for instance construction, the synchronization information exchange has to be real-time as well, to avoid collision and maintain motion synchrony [59], [132], [136].”
Past, Present, and Future of Aerial Robotic Manipulators (2022, background): “The key idea of [7], [8] was to convert the problem as a quasi-static motion planning problem, that is, given each waypoint of the desired payload pose”
Autonomous transportation and deployment with aerial robots for search and rescue missions (2011, background): “In this paper, outdoor field experiments of transportation and accurate deployment of loads with single/multiple autonomous aerial vehicles are presented.”
Adaptive Control of Quadrotor UAVs: A Design Trade Study With Flight Evaluations (2013, background): “tracking and regulation in indoor and outdoor settings [4], and cooperative manipulation [11], [12].”
Routing in Flying Ad Hoc Networks: A Comprehensive Survey (2020, background): “Cooperative transportation of load and deployment using multiple UAVs are considered in [57], [58].”
Survey of advances in guidance, navigation, and control of unmanned rotorcraft systems (2012, methodology): “A similar system for load manipulation and transportation by indoor quadrotors was developed and demonstrated at the University of Pennsylvania (Michael et al., 2011).”
Grasping from the air: Hovering capture and load stability (2011, background): “Several limited examples of flying vehicles physically interacting with objects have been demonstrated, such as in-flight refueling [1], [2] and the transport of slung loads, both individually and cooperatively [3], [4], [5], [6].”
Towards a swarm of agile micro quadrotors (2012, background): “However larger payloads can be manipulated and transported by multiple UAVs either using grippers or cables [20].”