Abstract
A hardware-in-the-loop test rig is presented to bridge the gap between basic aerial manipulation research and the ability of flying robots to perform tasks such as bridge repair, agriculture care, container inspection and other applications requiring interaction with the environment. Unmanned aerial vehicles have speed and mobility advantages over ground vehicles and can operate in 3-dimensional workspaces. In particular, the usefulness of these capabilities is highlighted in areas where ground robots cannot reach or terrains they are unable to navigate. However, most UAVs operating in near-earth or indoor environments still do not have the payload capabilities to support multi-degree of freedom manipulators. We present a rotorcraft emulation environment using a 7 degree of freedom manipulator. Since UAVs require significant setup time and to avoid potential crashes, our test and evaluation environment provides repeatable experiments and captures reactionary forces experienced during ground interaction. Recent experiments in insertion tests are presented. The lessons learned from these experiments will be ported onto an actual air vehicle with manipulator.
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Manuscript received August 31, 2013. This project was supported in part by a US NSF CRI II-New, Award # CNS-1205490, DoD Advanced Civil Schooling, and a U.S. Fullbright Scholarship.
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Korpela, C., Orsag, M. & Oh, P. Hardware-in-the-Loop Verification for Mobile Manipulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. J Intell Robot Syst 73, 725–736 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9950-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-013-9950-3