Flying Calligrapher: Contact-Aware Motion and Force Planning and Control for Aerial Manipulation

Xiaofeng Guo, Guanqi He, Jiahe Xu, Mohammadreza Mousaei, Junyi Geng, Sebastian Scherer, Guanya Shi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Aerial manipulation has gained interest in completing high-altitude tasks that are challenging for human workers, such as contact inspection and defect detection, etc. Previous research has focused on maintaining static contact points or forces. This letter addresses a more general and dynamic task: simultaneously tracking time-varying contact force in the surface normal direction and motion trajectories on tangential surfaces. We propose a pipeline that includes a contact-aware trajectory planner to generate dynamically feasible trajectories, and a hybrid motion-force controller to track such trajectories. We demonstrate the approach in an aerial calligraphy task using a novel sponge pen design as the end-effector, whose stroke width is positively related to the contact force. Additionally, we develop a touchscreen interface for flexible user input. Experiments show our method can effectively draw diverse letters, achieving an IoU of 0.59 and an end-effector position (force) tracking RMSE of 2.9 cm (0.7N).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)11194-11201
Number of pages8
JournalIEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume9
Issue number12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Control and Optimization
  • Artificial Intelligence

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